Language comprehension in autism

Here's a presentation I gave a few years ago at the Autism08 online conference. I'm thinking of writing this up properly as a chapter in a book I'm co-editing on Communication in Autism. So any feedback would be most gratefully received (including any more recent papers that I should include).

Abstract

In this paper, I review studies that have used a number of different methodologies to investigate comprehension of spoken and written language in autism. Difficulties understanding the meaning of spoken and written language are thought to be characteristic of autism. However, language comprehension skills vary widely between individuals and would appear to be closely linked to other core language skills. Moreover, traditional tasks used to assess language comprehension may prove difficult for people with autism for a number of reasons and thus underestimate true levels of comprehension.

Networks in the autistic brain: insights from graph theory

A couple of weeks ago I travelled from Sydney to a conference taking place in San Diego, California. There isn't a direct flight to San Diego so instead I had to fly via Los Angeles. Colleagues coming from Melbourne had an even more convoluted journey - they had to get a connecting flight to Sydney first before they could fly to LA. The issue here is that airline routes are determined by economic pressures. There simply aren't enough people wanting to travel from Sydney or Melbourne to San Diego on a regular basis for a direct route to be commercially viable. Instead, travellers rely on a small number of long-distance routes with local connecting flights at either end. In this way, it's still possible to get between any two airports with only a couple of flight transfers along the way.

But what has all this to do with autism?