Autism, neurodiversity, and language learning, Part VII

(Part VII in a series of posts that will soon take us to a highly contagious and dangerously inaccurate meme about what autism is.)

In my previous posts, I’ve made the following points:

–How much language you acquire, including how much language you comprehend, is correlated with how much attention you’ve paid, over the years, to other people’s speech and to what they are looking at and doing when speaking.

–Deficits in these attention behaviors, which are examples of what’s called Joint Attention, are among the core symptoms of autism. (If you don’t have deficits here, the diagnosis doesn’t apply).

–Therefore, the ability to acquire language and understand what other people saying is correlated with the severity of autism.

Autism, neurodiversity, and language learning, Part V

(Part V in a series of posts that will eventually take us to a highly contagious and dangerously inaccurate meme about what autism is.)

My previous post drew a connection between the severity of autism (whose diagnostic measures include Joint Attention behaviors) and the severity of the language impairment associated with autism. This connection, I suggested, explains why a significant proportion of people on the spectrum (somewhere around 25%) are nonverbal.