On the 27th and 28th of September this year I was invited to show our initial findings at the Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists conference in Glasgow. Below is the poster from the event which includes our preliminary findings. Basically it shows that our four test groups performed similarly on assessment of basic structural language (vocabulary and grammar). The big difference was in pragmatic language; the use of language in situational context. Here we found a pattern where females without autism performed the best, males without autism and females with autism were somewhere in the middle, and males with autism performed the worst. It would indicate that boys and girls do show a different pattern of strengths and weaknesses. They need to be assessed and supported with typically developing sex-matched peers in mind, not as one group. It also indicates that high-functioning language skills do not necessarily predict good pragmatic skills and therefore speech therapy could be useful for improving functional use of communication in this group.
Currently, I am working on the rest of the data and hoping to have a journal article ready to be released early next year. I will let you know as soon as it is ready to share.
communicationautism 