Why do aspies have strong verbal skills if autistic

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One of the most defining characteristics of autism is impaired language skills with many autistics having delayed speech. Bright autistics sometimes have exceptional spatial skills causing many to speculate that Einstein was autistic. They often are so visually intelligent they speak of thinking in pictures.

Yet people with aspergers have the opposite condition. They are verbally skilled but have much weaker spatial skills, indeed their spatial skills are so weak that psychologists can't seem to tell the difference between aspergers and non-verbal learning disability.


So where is the logic behind lumping these two conditions under a single category if they're total opposites? Both involve social impairments, but the cause might be very different. Autistics might be socially impaired because they lack verbal communication skills while aspies might be socially impaired because they lack non-verbal communication skills (I.e. Body language, tone of voice, reading facial expressions etc)

Perhaps there's no such thing as autism or aspergers. Perhaps aspergers is just the label we put on people who have both a non-verbal disability and OCD and classic autism is just a verbal disability combined with OCD.

Also, many people diagnosed with autism and Asperger's lack just about all of the defining features necessary for an OCD diagnosis. Your theory also doesn't account for sensory processing problems.

Some points:

*speech delays aren't a hallmark of autism, nor are they required for the diagnosis
many aspies *technically* had speech delays that weren't noticed in early childhood- things like pragmatic issues, echolalia, etc, are fairly common in aspies, but unlike noticeable speech delays, slip under the radar.

*anyone who would confuse Asperger's with NVLD deserves to lose their license

*autism and AS aren't opposites at all- the ability to verbalize thoughts is the issue; those with classic autism *and* those with AS do relatively poorly on performance IQ tests. It's just that the ability to verbally communicate is more lacking in autism than in AS. That's all that means.

*OCD isn't Asperger's plus NVLD, not even close. Yeah, they can be (and often are) comorbid, but it's not even the same ballpark. Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder plus NVLD plus attachment disorder plus sensory integration disorder plus social/general anxiety? Maybe. But why have 2 names for one thing? Autism is autism is autism.


In my opinion the only difference between me, a "high-functioning" aspie, and a non-verbal, classically autistic person is: I can speak, and I can speak well. Countless non-verbal autistics, many of whom lack even bladder and bowel control, once given the tools to communicate, express the same thoughts, needs, wants, and feelings that the highest-functioning of us do. Everything's the same inside our heads, it's just our varying abilities to get it out so others understand that separate us.

You really should watch some movies and videos with "severe" classical autistics who communicate via computers etc. It's remarkable how similar we ASD-ies all are under the surface.

I don't really know why this is, maybe because we get interested in things and by learning that topic we learn language and how to use it..? me myself i am very quiet and can stop talking for days, it feels like i have a delay in language cause i feel like a little kid who is still learning how to speak properly.. i would say that my verbal skills are more leaning towards basic autism than anything else, maybe this is something that only i have but it's the way it is, English is my natural language and i still sometimes forget simple words and don't know what certain words mean that aren't tough for most people. there are like thousands of words to say that something is glibbery and i only now glibbery.

People diagnosed with Asperger's are autistic, yes.

Is the part about spatial issues right? I was dx'd Aspie late in life and don't know much about it yet. I have always been intelligent and could always do math even though I didn't necessarily understand it, but when I got to geometry and saw a pyramid drawn in two dimensions my brain came to an absolute stop. My dad helped me, but I had never had an experience like that. I can draw well, and can draw something to scale almost exactly, without measuring, so that seems like good spatial skills. That experience in geometry was just so weird that I've been trying to understand what it was or why it happened ever since.

I have incredibly good verbal and writing skills, as evidenced by scores on multiple tests throughout the years, and a degree in English.

To make one thing clear, mental retardation usually is a co-morbid of Autism, however not all Autistics have mental retardation.