My Five-Year-Old Child Does Not Talk … Will He Ever? This guest
post is by Connie Kasari, Ph.D., a Professor of Education and
Psychiatry and the Center for Autism Research at UCLA. This is
the question and the worry for a quarter to about half of all
parents of children with autism. Research studies tell us that
children who can talk by the time they turn five years old have
better outcomes. But is this age marker meaningful, and what
does it mean exactly? The extraordinary success of early
intervention programs has been shrinking the numbers of children
who remain nonverbal. Still many children develop slowly,
becoming late speakers if at all. What do we know that helps
these children? Late speaking children were the subject of a
recent review paper, which was selected as one of Autism Speaks’
Top 10 Scientific Achievements in 2009 (Pickett, Pullara,
O’Grady & Gordon, 2009). The authors found 64 studies involving
167 children who learned to speak after age five. Several
important observations were noted. Fir