BRight · The BRight Side: Understanding the role of the Brain’s Right hemisphere for language development in autism

BRight will investigate alternative right-hemispheric pathways for language development in autism. While language is especially left-lateralized in the typically developing brain, there is increased right-hemispheric involvement in autism. It is unclear whether these right-hemispheric neural pathways contribute to language deficits or if they form a potential compensatory network, facilitating an alternative route for successful language development. This is especially interesting to examine in the preschool age as language abilities are at their most variable and intervention strategies at their most effective. BRight has four objectives: 1) characterize typically developing neural pathways for language in the left and right hemisphere; 2) compare individua neural pathways of autistic preschoolers to the typically developing children; 3) relate right hemisphere variables to a preschool battery of language assessments; 4) longitudinally examine preschool neural variation to school-age language abilities. BRight will achieve this by collaborating with an existing research consortium that studied autistic preschoolers using MRI and by adding a new time point to examine these children now that they are at the school age. BRight will overcome previous limitations like an overreliance on isolated brain measures and a dependence on group-level analyses that cannot capture the heterogeneity of the autism spectrum by employing novel data fusion and normative modeling approaches. By integrating across multiple brain measures (including structural MRI, diffusion MRI and resting-state fMRI). The highly interdisciplinary approach taken in BRight will fundamentally impact our understanding of brain-behavioral correlations and the neural foundation of language in autism. The project will have significant impact on the researcher’s career as she will receive rigorous training in cutting-edge neuroimaging and statistical techniques from leading experts in the field.