Exploring a breakdown in communication
One of the defining characteristics of autism is difficulty communicating with others. However, it is unclear whether those struggles arise only from the poor social skills commonly associated with autism, or whether autistic children suffer from more specific linguistic impairments. “If a kid doesn’t interact in the right way because of a social deficit, that could be a communication difficulty, but you wouldn’t really say that their linguistic ability in a computational sense was hurt,” says Kenneth Wexler, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.Wexler, a psychologist and linguist who has previously developed comprehensive models of how children learn language as part of normal development, has spent the past few years studying autistic children, in hopes of creating a framework to help pinpoint the source of their communication difficulties. In a study appearing in the April issue of the journal Language Acquisition, he reports that some autistic children...