Although the challenges that autistic students face adapting to college are often pronounced, they are similar to the challenges that students with other disabilities face (e.g., difficulties with social interaction, self-advocacy, and executive functioning). However, extant evaluations of services for autistic college students are very limited despite an emerging literature examining supports for college students with a range of other disabilities. Given that many autistic students do not self-identify as autistic in college, and consequently might avoid autism-specific services, autistic students might benefit from services that are designed to support a broad range of neurodiverse students, or services that are structured according to the principles of Universal Design. In order to develop such services, we assessed the self-reported needs of autistic college students and their peers with other disabilities. Guided by needs assessments and feedback from students, we developed and evaluated two semesters of mentor-led group programming for autistic college students and students with other disabilities. The first semester of the program focused on social skills; after receiving feedback from participants, the curriculum for the second semester focused on self-advocacy. Participation in social-skills groups was associated with decreased anxiety and autism symptoms. Participation in self-advocacy groups was associated with increased perceived social support from friends, academic self-efficacy, and more accurate definitions of self-advocacy. This research suggests that supports for neurodiverse college students should be developed with their input and should include opportunities to engage with diverse peers.

Diminutive derivations (e.g., froggy, bootie) constitute morphophonologically similar clusters of words in child-directed speech and serve as low-level schema for learning morphological regularities. Previous research has demonstrated that by regularizing noun endings, diminutives (e.g., Russian: domik, svechka) facilitate word-boundary identification and the acquisition of inflectional morphology. In this study, adult native speakers of English (N = 77) were exposed to diminutive and simplex transparently gender-marked nouns instantiating Russian case-marking and adjective-noun genderagreement patterns, over six 1-hour language-learning sessions. They were subsequently tested on their ability to extend grammatical patterns to new items and vocabulary recall. Learners showed equivalent learning of the trained phrases containing diminutive and simplex nouns but were more accurate in generalizing morphological patterns to diminutive nouns. Furthermore, learners showed a diminutive advantage in vocabulary retention. By increasing the invariant parts of words, diminutive derivations may reduce the amount of phonological material to be memorized and, subsequently, enhance word learning.The research was supported by grants from Language Learning and PSC-CUNY to P. J. Brooks. We thank Jessica Lee, Rosemarie Marronaro, and Urooj Syed for their assistance with data collection.

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