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The relationship of gestural joint attention behaviors and the development of effective communication skills in autism and developmental language delay (DLD) was investigated. Autistic and DLD children matched for MA and MLU were compared on measures of gestural joint attention behavior, personal pronoun use, and spontaneous communicative behavior. DLD children responded correctly to joint attention interactions more often than autistic children, and their spontaneous gestural behavior was more communicative and developmentally advanced. Correct production of "I/you" pronouns was related to number of spontaneous initiations for autistic but not for DLD children. Measures of spontaneous joint attention behaviors were in general not related to MA, CA, or MLU for either group. DLD children's performance suggests no special impairment of joint attention skills, whereas autistic children's performance suggests a joint attention deficit in addition to a language deficit.

This study examined the roles of verbal and nonverbal sources of information in the ability of persons with and without autism to recognize emotion. Child, adolescent, and young adult participants in four groups [Lower Functioning Autism (LFA) (n = 17), High Functioning Autism (HFA) (n = 18), Lower Functioning Comparison (LFC) (n = 18), and High Functioning Comparison (HFC) (n = 23)] identified emotions shown (happy, angry, sad, surprised, or neutral) in video clips of individuals expressing emotion verbally, nonverbally, or both. Verbal expressions of emotion were either Explicit, Implicit, or Neutral, whereas nonverbal expressions were Animate or Flat (3 × 2). Pairwise ANCOVAs indicated no group differences between HFA and HFC groups or between the LFA and LFC groups, and indicated instead group differences between higher and lower functioning persons. With groups collapsed into High Functioning (HF) and Lower Functioning (LF), significant group differences were found. Performance of LF individuals suggested they had difficulty inferring how a person felt based on what the person said, if the emotion was not explicitly named. Performance of HF individuals suggested they relied more on nonverbal than on verbal information to determine a speaker's emotion, except where the emotion was explicitly named. Results suggested that persons with autistic spectrum disorders can use affective information from multiple sources in much the same ways as persons of comparable developmental level without autism.

The present study investigated the ability of high functioning verbal children and adolescents with autism or Down's syndrome to tell a story to a listener. Sixteen subjects with autism and 16 with Down's syndrome (DS), matched on verbal mental age, watched a short puppet show or video sketch and were then asked to tell the story to a listener and answer follow-up questions. The majority of both groups were able to produce recognizable, though primitive, narratives. The groups did not differ in general story characteristics and both groups exhibited errors in language use. Subjects with autism had a greater tendency to produce bizarre language and adopt an 'externalized' point of view in which the puppets/actors were seen as objects rather than characters. Also, DS subjects produced significantly more communicative gestures. Although the groups were about equally able to supply information for follow-up questions, autistic subjects produced a higher proportion of bizarre responses. Results indicate that the story recall ability of autistic subjects resembles that of language-matched, mentally retarded persons. However, some autistic subjects appeared to have difficulty grasping the story as a representation of meaningful events. Results are discussed in relation to the autistic person's awareness of listeners' needs and aspects of the social environment.

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