he child is quite bright. Most severely dysphasic autistic children do not acquire functional reading skills with current educational practices. Verbal autistic children do not know how to participate in conversation, maintain topic, take turns, look at their conversational partner, or interpret tone of voice, facial expression, and body language. They have deficient ability to use rhythm and intonation to clarify meaning and often sound stilted. They may speak in a monotone voice, too loudly or softly, or in a singsong fashion.There are autistic children who learn to read aloud without instruction at a very young age. Typically, they have little understanding of what they have read and cannot use words for communication that they have no difficulty reading. Hyperlexia, with these characteristics, is uncommon in non-autistic children (Rapin 1995). While hyperlexia implies that at least some of these children's cognitive skills are normal, or even superior, early fluent speech and hyperlexia do not guarantee overall normal intelligence in the autistic population.The DSM-III-R places inadequate ability to engage in imaginative activity under the same rubric as impaired language and communication (Rapin 1995). No doubt language facilitates this type of activity, but it can also be considered a feature of the strikingly inadequate play of autistic children of all ages. Autistic children regularly display repetitive movements such as flapping of the hands when excited, twirling, humming, running around in circles, rocking, head banging, twisting of the fingers, or twisting locks of hair, sometimes to the point of baldness (Rapin 1995). They may vehemently resist change in routines or the environment and have unusual tolerance for repetitiveness. For example, a young child may spend hours playing with water, shaking a string, flipping a light switch, rolling a toy car, tearing paper to tiny bits, or doing the same puzzle repeated...
