Language and Speech in Autism
Annual Review of Linguistics
Vol. 2: 413-425
(Volume publication date January 2016)
First published online as a Review in Advance on November 4, 2015
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030514-124824
Morton Ann Gernsbacher,1 Emily M. Morson,2 and Elizabeth J. Grace3
1Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706; email: MAGernsb@wisc.edu
2Departments of Psychology and Neuroscience, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405; email: emorson@umail.iu.edu
3Department of Special Education, National Louis University, Chicago, Illinois 60603; email: Elizabeth.Grace@nl.edu
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ABSTRACT
Autism
is a developmental disability characterized by atypical social
interaction, interests or body movements, and communication. Our review
examines the empirical status of three communication phenomena believed
to be unique to autism: pronoun reversal (using the pronoun you when the pronoun I
is intended, and vice versa), echolalia (repeating what someone has
said), and a reduced or even reversed production-comprehension lag (a
reduction or reversal of the well-established finding that speakers
produce less sophisticated language than they can comprehend). Each of
these three phenomena has been claimed to be unique to autism;
therefore, each has been proposed to be diagnostic of autism, and each
has been interpreted in autism-centric ways (psychoanalytic
interpretations of pronoun reversal, behaviorist interpretations of
echolalia, and clinical lore about the production-comprehension lag).
However, as our review demonstrates, none of these three phenomena is in
fact unique to autism; none can or should serve as diagnostic of
autism, and all call into question unwarranted assumptions about
autistic persons and their language development and use.
