Those aren’t mutually exclusive—see here for example. I have no opinion either way on whether there are lots of kids with autism who aren’t getting diagnosed with autism (I’ve never looked into it), but if that’s true, I don’t see why it would give me any reason to be skeptical of Camarata’s claims here. Can you explain?
Engaging in pretend play has nothing to do with autism. Some autistic kids don’t, some do.
“Nothing to do” is a strong claim—IIUC, you’re claiming that there’s no correlation whatsoever between autism and pretend play. My quick literature / google search strongly suggests that this is not true. Do you have a reference or anything? Or how did you come to believe that? Do you have a sense of how common this position is among experts?
Also what you describe as the specific disconnect between the brain and mouth in speech is called speech apraxia and is the main reason why there are late-talking or non-speaking autistic people.
I’m not in a position to adjudicate this debate, but FWIW Camarata claims that apraxia is vanishingly rare as a cause of delayed speech. He describes showing a video of a child with (what he calls) real speech apraxia to an audience of speech pathologists, and he said `have any of you seen a kid like this’, and everyone said ‘no, never’, and he said ‘OK so why are you guys diagnosing apraxia all the time?’ (That’s a paraphrase; I don’t have the book on-hand.) (I myself was diagnosed with speech apraxia when my parents brought me in for a diagnosis at age 2.something in the 1980s; my parents had kept the records from the hospital.)
Those aren’t mutually exclusive—see here for example. I have no opinion either way on whether there are lots of kids with autism who aren’t getting diagnosed with autism (I’ve never looked into it), but if that’s true, I don’t see why it would give me any reason to be skeptical of Camarata’s claims here. Can you explain?
“Nothing to do” is a strong claim—IIUC, you’re claiming that there’s no correlation whatsoever between autism and pretend play. My quick literature / google search strongly suggests that this is not true. Do you have a reference or anything? Or how did you come to believe that? Do you have a sense of how common this position is among experts?
I’m not in a position to adjudicate this debate, but FWIW Camarata claims that apraxia is vanishingly rare as a cause of delayed speech. He describes showing a video of a child with (what he calls) real speech apraxia to an audience of speech pathologists, and he said `have any of you seen a kid like this’, and everyone said ‘no, never’, and he said ‘OK so why are you guys diagnosing apraxia all the time?’ (That’s a paraphrase; I don’t have the book on-hand.) (I myself was diagnosed with speech apraxia when my parents brought me in for a diagnosis at age 2.something in the 1980s; my parents had kept the records from the hospital.)