AS and Verbal Ability

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Hi All,

I know very little about AS. My son was recently diagnosed. However, he did very well and the psych was surprised at his verbal ability and comprehension skills putting him at least a year ahead of his general age group (10). Is it not common for people with AS to have excellent verbal skills? I'd welcome your opinion.
Thanks...

I think it is, perhaps even to speak a little early. My son did not speak beyond a word or two until he was 4 but they still diagnosed him with Asperger's. They said they did because he had obvious receptive skills and was able to get what he wanted. He also had much higher performance scores than verbal (performance above average/verbal below average).

Maybe I picked it up all wrong (what the psych was saying) because I thought it was common. He spoke very early... we were having conversations at 2. Am a bit confused? Are there issues with comprehension then?

Right now the stated single difference between Asperger's and Kanner's autism is the onset of speech acquisition. I

have also read that people with AS tend to have higher verbal scores than performance and Kanner's the opposite. I

personally wonder if that's true. It would assume everyone with Asperger's had a strong desire for socialization and that

doesn't seem to be the case. It's hard to generalize though and perhaps it's more a matter of personality differences.

The stereotypical view of Asperger's seems to be someone who is very verbal and hyper social but runs into difficulties

because of trouble with reading non verbal cues.

My AS son spoke early and continues to have a very advanced vocabulary (he is 13). This is not uncommon for kids high on the spectrum; they are often very gifted in a number of areas. What you may have also noticed are different areas of what seem like surprising deficits; how can a child that is obviously gifted not be able to do X? Well, that would be the ASD. As I get to know more families with members on the spectrum, it has really stuck me that AS is a condition of extremes, more than anything; exactly what each unique person excels with v. struggles with can vary quite a bit.

Exactly this. Both our sons have excellent verbal abilities and above average vocabularies. People are often shocked that the "little professors" who are clearly so smart still struggle to do "simple" things like buttoning buttons or sorting out and remembering more than one verbal instruction at a time. They have highs and lows, and this does seem to be a hallmark of AS.

I will say this - my son regularly shocks people with his vocabulary: he is able to use very advanced words correctly. Last year his teacher would giggle proudly every time he sent the other kids in the room running for the dictionary. He also spoke at a very young age. He can hear a word and its context once and bring it into correct (if somewhat precocious) everyday use.

However, if you ask him what the word he used means, he frequently is unable to provide a definition, or will define it incorrectly (he only needs to hear the definition once to remember it, though.) My understanding is that this is not uncommon in kids with AS - that they have a somewhat different relationship to language than the rest of us do; I think of it as kind of like hoarding vocabulary.

Yeah id have to agree with the whole AS + high verbal ability. I myself when I had testing done at 10-12 years old, I surprised the examiners because of the fact my reading, writing, and verbal comprehension scores were, according to the examiners, "Way above college level".

Its even evident if people hear me talk. My non-blood related uncle, who is a professor at the university of new mexico, even says I sound like someone who has graduated from Princeton, Harvard, or oxford with how my speech patterns are.

In diagnostic literature, then yes, they may actually have high levels of verbal aptitude. Not everyone with Asperger's Disorder may have a mastery of the English language, but when they were attempting to diagnose me, they used, "a girl with poor motor skills and emotional control, yet a highly preserved and enhanced language domain".

My verbal ability on the IQ test was just average. But my strength is with written words. I'm told when I talk I talk funny because of my word choices and voice, but I get overwhelmed very easily with spoken word and am selectively mute.

I have an advanced vocabulary but often do not know how to pronounce half the words I'm familiar with. I love to read. My highest score on a subtest was matrix reasoning which isn't verbal though, go figure.

technically, speech acquisition is not the single difference. there are a few differences in the criteria, one being the communication category of which speech acquisition is only one of four possible options to fulfill the communication criteria.

one of the aspergers criteria tho is a lack of significant general language delay, and a lot of aspies do pick up speech early it seems.

my youngest, dx aspergers but should be dx kanners, has lower verbal and higher performance scores. as i understand it, at least some of the deviation is caused by a severe language impairment. his acquisition was delayed but not considered significantly so, receptive and expressive language is normal, but he has severe issues with intelligibility which makes verbal testing results lower than they should be. his verbal score should raise as his speech impairment is corrected with therapy. it will be interesting to see where it finally lands in relation to the performance score.

it certainly makes sense tho that classic autistics would on average have a lower verbal score due to the nature of the disorder. makes me wonder how much of that is caused solely by communication impairments that could be corrected, and how many have been given lower IQ scores than they should have because of it.

The main difference between High Functioning Autism and Aspergers Syndrome WAS "delayed speech" however this will change with the new diagnostic manual.

It was never a good distinction anyway because;
a. children's speech tends to improve based on environmental factors (eg: how people communicate around them and what options, like speech therapy they're given).
b. it ignores co-conditions.

Many of the features of aspergers lend themselves to "better vocabulary" but NOT to higher IQ. Unfortunately, you can still have aspergers plus dyslexia, aspergers plus ADHD, aspergers plus Non-Verbal Learning Difficulties or any of a multitude of other combinations. It's generally the co-condition which pulls communication skills down.

Absolutely, this is what had me insisting there was something different about my now 5 year old. She seemed to me, emotionally stunted and intellectually gifted.

What they noted about her language was that it was very advanced but abnormal and atypical for her age. Unusual intonation and "overly formal" for a 5 year old. Verbal IQ was High Average (compared to Performance which was Superior).

In the Asaptive Behavior report Communication (reception, expressive, written) was at 86th %ile as compared to her Socialization (interpersonal, play, coping) 6th %ile. If that's not an example of the extremes DW_a_Mom was talking about, I don't know what is!

DD has Asperger's and has a verbal IQ of 139 - her struggles are more in the math realm and visual-spatial IQ (she has a 30 point gap between her verbal IQ and visual spatial IQ scores). She also struggles with processing too many verbal instructions at once and has issues with some executive functioning (planning, self regulation, etc.). She also struggles with language pragmatics / non-verbal cues / and has a huge defecit in the area of recognizing emotions on people's faces.
It is fairly common for kids who are on the higher functioning end of the spectrum to have advanced verbal abilities.

I also have high verbal skills. I scored in the 90th percentile on the verbal section of the GRE (test for grad school). My non-verbal skills, however, are pretty bad. I'm spatially ret*d.

Thanks for all the replies. Its great to get such varied and useful feedback. My sons report that he has good verbal ability and the pscyh thought this was strange in an AS kid. He doesn;t excel in anything, everything else is in the average range. So basically I'm still totally confused.