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Facing the Complexity of Language in Autism (Response to Commentators)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Mikhail Kissine
Mikhail Kissine*
Affiliation:
Université libre de Bruxelles
*
ACTE, Université libre de Bruxelles, CP 175, avenue F.D. Roosevelt, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium, [Mikhail.Kissine@ulb.be]
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1. Introduction. The diversity and the scope of the responses to my target article (Kissine 2021) demonstrate the great potential linguistic research has for the field of autism. These responses also reveal, albeit sometimes implicitly, that a chief challenge in researching language in autism lies in the complexity and the subtlety of the data. In organizing my own response under this angle, I hope to react in a constructive way to most of the criticisms and suggestions voiced in these commentaries. In the next section, I return to the relationship between socio-communicative skills and language trajectories in autism; in particular, I argue that it is crucial to distinguish between predictors of language delays and those of language outcomes. Next, I discuss the complexity of pragmatics in autism, warning against reductionist attempts to subsume all data on pragmatics in autism under a single processing model. In the third section, I turn to the more general issue of the variability of individual profiles on the autism spectrum and ask how it can be integrated in a meaningful way within research on language in autism. I conclude this brief response to commentators by issuing a plea to think of the diversity of linguistic theories and schools as an opportunity for better understanding language in autism.

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Type
Perspectives
Information
Language , Volume 97 , Issue 3 , September 2021, pp. e228 - e237
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Linguistic Society of America

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