Differences in praxis performance and receptive language during fingerspelling between deaf children with and without autism spectrum disorder

The deaf children with autism spectrum disorder had greater errors in pace, sequence precision, accuracy, and body part use and also took longer to fingerspell each word. Additionally, the deaf children with autism spectrum disorder had poor receptive language skills and this strongly correlated with their praxis performance and autism severity. These findings extend the evidence for dyspraxia in hearing children with autism spectrum disorder to deaf children with autism spectrum disorder.

Poor sign language production in children with autism spectrum disorder may contribute to their poor gestural learning/comprehension and vice versa. Our findings have therapeutic implications for children with autism spectrum disorder when teaching sign language.