Communicatively, people with autism are impaired at pointing and gesture, imitation and pretend play, conversation, and speech content and prosody.

Here again, a strong theme is rapid flexibility and coordination of cognitive resources in response to unpredictable inputs: participating in the give-and-take of conversation, and using language and prosody flexibly to convey information, instead of in a stereotyped and scripted way,

Language itself is one of the most variable aspects of the autism phenotype. There are people with autism who are completely mute, and those whose language is perfectly intact, albeit imperfectly applied for social and communicative purposes. Many people with autism can give an extensive discourse on a topic of interest to them, yet still be unable to participate conversationally in the interests of another person.

Copyright © 2004 Matthew Belmonte. All rights reserved.