Language and Speech in Autism
This publication is included in the Autistic Autism Scholarship Project. one author of this publication is identified as autistic in the project.
About the autistic author markerGernsbacher, M. A., Morson, E. M., & Grace, E. J. (2014). Language and Speech in Autism. Annual Review of Linguistics, 2(1), 413-425. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-124824
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Authors
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.
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Cited bibliography overview
These indicators describe the bibliography cited by this publication. An author name is counted each time it appears in one cited reference, so the same person can be counted more than once. Names not yet linked to an author already present in AutiHub are treated as unknown, not as non-autistic. Last computed: 19 Sep 2026 01:01.
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- 64
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- 19
- References with detected author names
- 86 / 87 (98.9%)
- Without detected author names
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- 5
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- From DOI or external metadata
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- 0
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- 3
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