Can you have both Asperger's and learning difficulties?

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I heard people only get diagnosed with Asperger's if they have average or high IQ, but I don't think this is always right.

A colleague of mine has a 10-year-old daughter who has always been behind the other kids intellectually and needed extra help with her work. She also used to attend speech therapy when she was younger because she had trouble pronouncing her words, although she's a lot better at it now. But my colleague (her father) feels that she might be on the autism spectrum too. He says she is often in her own world and doesn't always like to play with other children at school, although she isn't exactly an outcast. She is the quietest child in the class. She isn't really into the things her friends are into, and she gets fascinated by things like the weather (she often talks about thunderstorms).

I'm not asking for an online armchair diagnosis for someone's little girl, I was just using her as an example. I have seen her a couple of times, she has a little bit of a lisp and often is seen biting on her sleeve, although she is very smiley and friendly. Can a person have Asperger's and intellectual learning delays, or can intellectual learning delays cause a child to seem a little different from their peers?

You can have both, I know there are a lot of aspies with down syndrome for instance. IDs can make a child seem odd, but it is comparing their social skills to the other areas of their development instead of to the normal level to see if it is due to the ID or autism. The diagnostics has to make adjustments based on the ID.

Having a "learning disability", and having a low IQ are two different things. Its not obvious from your description that she has less native intelligence than does anyone else. Many adults are dyslexic and cant read, but are of normal, or above normal intelligence.

I am pretty sure that many who were dxd with having aspergers (when it was used as a diagnostic label) also were officially diagnosed with learning disabilities like dyslexia. So I doubt that the two things are considered diagnostically mutually exclusive.

It does sound like she could be on the autism spectrum. However - if her speech problems are considered to be a "speech delay" then she might have been not classified as aspergian when that label was used, but just as autistic.

Her school teachers say she has learning difficulties and she's been needing extra help since she first started school. She doesn't have attention problems because she can sit still and her bedroom is incredibly tidy and organised, and her mind is rather organised too.

Her dad says she is better playing with one other child rather than in a group, and if she is in a group she becomes bossy, and if she can't get her own way she gets all upset. But she is an only child, so maybe that has something to do with it. She is rather well-behaved at home, but she doesn't like anybody moving her things in her room.

That's all I know. But she does definitely have intellectual learning difficulties.

These are all just labels anyway. People are all on all kinds of different axis on the continuum of behavior. The labels are just best provisional slices of the pie that they have at the moment. So who knows what slice they would put her in? They might put her in PDD-NOS (pervasive developmental disorder - or whatever its called- "not otherwise specified"). Which basically means "we don't know what the kid has" ( as the mom of young man with that label explained it to me after I meet the both of them at a support group meeting). But she does sound a bit autistic, with maybe a touch NT type neurosis from being an only child.

Yes' it's possible. I'm Dx'ed with a high IQ, ASD, & Dyscalculia.

I'm an Aspie who's dyslexic & has other related learning disabilities. I know I'm less intelligent than most Aspies & most of my peers.

Yes, it is possible. Asperger's can co-exist with dyslexia, AD(H)D, hyperlexia and a host of other difficulties. My difficulties were mostly social in nature.