Aaron Shield Autism Summary

In order to understand autism more than what is understood, psycholinguist Aaron Shield analyzed three traits deaf autistic children possess in hopes of comprehending how all autistic children acquire language, whether it is spoken or signed. The points consisted of the difficulty in perceiving others’ point of views by failing to imitate them while communicating in sign language, lack of pronoun use, and analyzing some of the underlying effects of the social deficits that come with autism. The first point brought insights towards deaf autistic children’s inability to view others’ perspective by signing in the reverse direction as their instructors. Afterwards, Shield realized that both groups of autistic children have a tendency to not use
For a while, children who were diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI) often had autism as well, which caused numerous professionals to question the validity of the concept as it was recognized to only affect the acquirement of language. Shortly after it was changed to language impairment, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition came to be as it includes numerous components in diagnosing a child with language impairment. In most cases, autism still co-exists with language impairment as it causes a child to struggle with obtaining language while remaining behind everyone else socially. As in the case of Shield’s studies, some of the behaviors that occur in autistic children were prevalent in both hearing and deaf autistic
Perhaps Shield’s solution would be appealing to the audience if he would have presented some statistics as to how his solution came to be since his previous studies only justified that sign language would not work. On the other hand, Shield believed deaf autistic children had the potential to clarify how all autistic children acquire language, and yet he did not demonstrate to the readers as to how their traits can justify some of the behaviors hearing autistic children possess. Furthermore, Shield’s first point did not seem to fit in because although a great amount of deaf autistic children signs in reverse while conversing with someone in sign language, most hearing autistic children do not appear to know how to sign. Within the second and third points, Shield was able to demonstrate to the audience how some of the deaf autistic children are similar to the hearing ones. Overall, Shield presented an interesting article as to how some of the behaviors of deaf autistic children provided some insight as to how communication can improve for all autistic children based off some