Behavioral Approaches to Social Skill Development in Autism

The social interaction deficit in autism was early recognized as pathognomonic to the disorder, with Kanner noting that the children appeared to have “come into the world without innate ability to form the usual, biologically affective contact with people...” (Kanner, 1943, p. 43). Now, after decades of debate regarding the preeminence of the linguistic versus the cognitive deficit in autism (Rutter, 1982a), impairment in the ability to develop and maintain adequate social relationships is again being addressed as central to autism (Hermelin, 1982; Rutter, 1985, 1982b). Hermelin particularly stresses the difficulty that these individuals have in understanding and utilizing nonverbal communicative information and suggests that this difficulty may account, at least in part, for the inability to understand thoughts and feelings—their own or those of others. She further suggests that, since many persons with autism have learned to develop linguistic ability through various external interventions, they may be able to learn this nonverbal language as though they were developing a foreign language.