Social Communication Impairments in Fluently Verbal Individuals

It is not because an individual with ASD is fluently verbal that he/she doesn't face language and communication challenges, since language is a social phenomenon (Self, 2013).

Individuals with ASD who have a good vocabulary could face difficulties due to a literal understanding or due to a concrete way of thinking and inflexibility of thought, which might be expressed by their difficulties in understanding figures of speech and idioms or understanding that certain words have alternative meanings.

Regarding social language, a person with ASD may experience difficulties when making inferences; when answering to WH questions (who, when, where, what...); when writing or reading complex sentence structures; and when connecting ideas from a conversation or text (Vicker, 2009).

Regarding social communication, individuals with ASD may experience difficulties understanding others' perspectives or points of view; when experiencing sensory overload; when talking aloud with self in public; initiating, maintaining or terminating a conversation; understanding others' roles and/or to adjust topic and/or speech according to situation; understanding that he/she needs to be clear to be understood; monitoring own comprehension to be able to seek clarification if needed; and making predictions (Vicker, 2009).

A person with ASD may not understand that other people have their own ideas and motivations, and that their personal interests may not be interesting to their peers. An obsession with personal interests may prevent him/her to participate in reciprocal interactions (Selfe, 2013; Vicker, 2009).

Some comprehension problems may be masked by the use of sophisticated language, when a person with ASD tries to promote an inflated self-image (Selfe, 2013; Vicker, 2009).

Sensory issues may lead to communication problems as well. A person with ASD may experience difficulties to listen if highly stimulated, or a person with ASD can lie to achieve sensory relief – e.g. be left alone (Selfe, 2013; Vicker, 2009).

To enhance communication specific resources should be prepared and used, in order to address specific needs of individual students. Those resources should always provide options and variety.

For example, we can use visual aids to facilitate the communication: visual cards with particular words and symbols; boards to help express emotions or feelings (“feelings' meter”, “emotions' chart”) which help working out semantic difficulties. Or, other example, we can teach expected behaviours in diverse social contexts through rehearsals: playing games in a group context to teach social communication skills through mimic and exemplar attitudes.