Ruth Grossman
Professor, School of Communication
Dr. Ruth Grossman’s research is focused on various aspects of face-to-face communication in autistic and non-autistic children and adults. She is specifically interested in how conversation partners integrate and produce verbal and nonverbal information, such as facial expressions and prosody, as well as how those expressions are perceived by others.
She is the founder and director of Emerson’s FACE (Facial Affective and Communicative Expressions) Lab, which provides hands-on training and research support for undergraduate and graduate students during the academic year and the summer. Her work has been published in several refereed journals, including Scientific Reports, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, Autism, and Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Dr. Grossman’s work has been funded externally by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the American Speech-Language and Hearing Association. Recent NIH grants include a five-year study of conversation and language in autistic and non-autistic teens with colleagues from the University of Connecticut, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and Aarhus University in Denmark; and a separate five-year study, co-conducted with a researcher from CHOP, into non-verbal communication in autistic and non-autistic teens.
During the 2023-24 academic year, Dr. Grossman was the Mary Beth and Chris Gordon Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where she gave a talk on the intersectionality of gender and autism.
Courses
- Neurologic Foundations in CSD
- Research Co-Curricular
- Autism
- Master's Thesis
Academic Work
- 2025, “Impact of conversational context on gaze patterns of autistic and non-autistic adolescents,” with Rees, A., Mertens, J. & Zane, E., Research in Autism, 125
- 2025, “Positive Emotional Valence in Spontaneous Facial Expressions of Autistic Adolescents,” with Sager, M., Ventresca, H., Mertens, J., & Zane, E. Scientific Reports 15(1), 15341
- 2025, “Social first impressions and perceived gender in autistic and non-autistic youth,” with Baer, M., Cola, M., Knox, A., Lyons, M., Schillinger, S., Lee, A., Worth, B., & Parish-Morris, J. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 5240
- 2024, “Normal but different: Autistic adolescents who score within normal ranges on standardized language tests produce frequent linguistic irregularities in spontaneous discourse,” with Zane, E. R., Autism and Developmental Language Impairments. DOI 10.1177/23969415241283378
- 2024, “First-Person Perspectives of Gender-Affirming Voice Feminization Training: A Mixed Methods Approach,” with Harris, K., Worth, B., & Beck, L., Journal of Voice
- 2023, “Analysis of Noun Phrase Ambiguity in Narratives Reveals Differences in Referential Establishment but not Cohesion for Older Autistic Children,” with Zane, E. R., Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1-19
- 2022, “Like, it's important: The frequency and use of the discourse marker like in older autistic children,” with Jones, R. & Zane, E. R., Autism & Developmental Language Impairments, 7: 1-13.
