Social cognition in developmental language disorders and high-level autism

Two groups of children with contrasting types of developmental language disorder (phonologic-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic) were compared with a group of children with high-level autism and with a control group of normal children on tests of social cognition (theory of mind; social comprehension; and detection of eye direction). The similarly poor performances of the semantic-pragmatic group and the autistic group suggest that semantic-pragmatic language disorder lies on the autistic spectrum.