whats the biggest deifference between............

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Autism vs Aspergers? whats the biggest difference between the 2

3 consonants.

All Asperger's is Autism but not all Autism is Asperger's.

Aspergers <-- No speech/language delay. Yet we manage to not pick up on the nonverbal aspects.

I agree with jc6chan. The only real difference is no speech delay with AS; but there IS speech delay with Classic Autism.

There is sometimes speech delay with autism. It is not a required criteria.

Also, some of Kanner's original patients didn't have speech delays at all, and would have easily fit in alongside Asperger's patients.

To fuzz it up even more, speech acquisition isn't the criteria for Asperger's. It is the acquisition of functional, age appropriate speech. I could speak and even had a precocious vocabulary, But I could not carry on a conversation worth a damn and had little to no conversational capacity with my peers.

And yesterday I was working on the house with my sons and I had to explain something. I was staring right at the object of discussion and cold not come up with the word for it. For a bout 10 seconds there was a total disconnect with the "word subsystem".

Diagnostically, they always say speech delay. This has been called into question.

According to Attwood, those diagnosed with HFA in childhood almost never partner up later in life. But there are exceptions.

Many people think Temple Grandin is very HFA, rather than Aspergian. And yet, she now always says she has Aspergers.

The confusion seems to stem from the two different diagnostic systems.

There's a simple linear one which goes LFA--->HFA---->Aspergers---->Residual Aspergers.

This is seems to be based entirely on outcomes. If one holds a full-time job, lives independently, cultivates a few friendships, is from a distance, (with the street light behind one), indistingushiable from the NT population, one can get a psychologist to diagnose one as having "residual aspergers", and still receive social/insurance paid services for the likes of, marital counseling, addiction couseling, etc....

But then, needless to say, wiring is never mild. It doesn't go away, anymore than ADHD, or dyslexia goes away. One simply learns to deal with the world. Just as the NT population does. We simply go about it differently.

The other more nuanced system, which as far as I can tell is never used by insurance companies, schools, or most diagnosticians has parallel lines of low to high functioning for both autism and aspergers.
1. LFA--->HFA
and
2. Low Functioning Aspergers---->High Functioning Aspergers

Donna Williams is an exception to the stereotype of the HFA who remains unpartnered,. In her book, Autism An Inside Out Approach, pp. 274-8
She discusses the differences between autism and aspergers. She has HFA, and is married to a man who has Aspergers. Very interesting comparison, difficult to sum up quickly..... And entirely unsubstantiated by research, but by far the best comparison that's been attempted, as far as I'm concerned.

Buy the book, and support an autistic. We have dentist bills, too.

This sort of question confuses me a fair bit. All I can think is that people have trouble realising that Autism is A SPECTRUM - where it's entirely conceivable for people to have an "Autistic" condition such as Aspergers - without displaying "classic" Autistic symptoms such as rolling eyes and constant rocking etc. I think it's quite IGNORANT really...

Aspergers is a form of autism; however, there are more differences between Aspergers and classic autism than just the usual speech delay (which, as pointed out, is not always the case for classic autism. There is some kind of communication delay in autism, but it does not necessarily have to be all verbal speech). Check out the book Asperger Syndrome if interested. It is hard to summarize, but gives a couple hundred pages of information of the differences and similarities between aspergers and classic autism.