Autistic kids and Pronouns

Autistic Deaf children avoid using pronouns, just like their hearing counterparts. A news study out of the University of Texas found deaf children with autism tended to refer to themselves with a name sign rather than a sign pronoun. The two linguistics professors who ran the study speculate that it says something about the way people with autism experience the self, rathe than the result of the arbitrary nature of English pronouns as was thought when studying only hearing autistic children. Read details of the study here.