Literacy in nonspeaking autistic people.

LAY ABSTRACT: Many autistic people who do not talk cannot tell other people what they know or what they are thinking. As a result, they might not be able to go to the schools they want, share feelings with friends, or get jobs they like. It might be possible to teach them to type on a computer or tablet instead of talking. But first, they would have to know how to spell. Some people do not believe that nonspeaking autistic people can learn to spell. We did a study to see if they can. We tested 31 autistic teenagers and adults who do not talk much or at all. They played a game on an iPad where they had to tap flashing letters. After they played the game, we looked at how fast they tapped the letters. They did three things that people who know how to spell would do. First, they tapped flashing letters faster when the letters spelled out sentences than when the letters made no sense. Second, they tapped letters that usually go together faster than letters that do not usually go together. This shows that they knew some spelling rules. Third, they paused before tapping the first letter of a new word. This shows that they knew where one word ended and the next word began. These results suggest that many autistic people who do not talk can learn how to spell. If they are given appropriate opportunities, they might be able to learn to communicate by typing.

Non-autistic adults can recognize posed autistic facial expressions: Implications for internal representations of emotion.

Autistic people report that their emotional expressions are sometimes misunderstood by non-autistic people. One explanation for these misunderstandings could be that the two neurotypes have different internal representations of emotion: Perhaps they have different expectations about what a facial expression showing a particular emotion looks like. In three well-powered studies with non-autistic college students in the United States (total N = 632), we investigated this possibility. In Study 1, participants recognized most facial expressions posed by autistic individuals more accurately than those posed by non-autistic individuals. Study 2 showed that one reason the autistic expressions were recognized more accurately was because they were better and more intense examples of the intended expressions than the non-autistic expressions. In Study 3, we used a set of expressions created by autistic and non-autistic individuals who could see their faces as they made the expressions, which could allow them to explicitly match the expression they produced with their internal representation of that emotional expression. Here, neither autistic expressions nor non-autistic expressions were consistently recognized more accurately. In short, these findings suggest that differences in internal representations of what emotional expressions look like are unlikely to play a major role in explaining why non-autistic people sometimes misunderstand the emotions autistic people are experiencing.

How Closely Related Are Parent and Child Reports of Child Alexithymia?

Alexithymia is a subclinical trait involving difficulty describing and identifying emotions. It is common in a number of psychiatric conditions. Alexithymia in children is sometimes measured by parent report and sometimes by child self-report, but it is not yet known how closely related the two measures are. This is an important question both theoretically and practically, in terms of research design and clinical practice. We conducted a preliminary study to investigate this question in a sample of 6- to 11-year-old neurotypical children and their parents (N = 29 dyads). Parent and child reports were not correlated, and 93% of parents under-estimated their child's level of alexithymia relative to the child's self-report. Based on these results, we hypothesize that when asked to report on the child's alexithymia, children and parents may not be reporting on the same phenomenon, and thus these two measures may not be interchangeable. These provocative findings, however, must be considered preliminary: our analyses were sufficiently powered to detect a strong relation between the two types of report had one existed, but our analyses were not sufficiently powered to distinguish between a small relation and no relation at all.