Cognitive scripts in autistic children and adolescents.

People normally rely on cognitive scripts to structure social interaction. As the dysfunctional social behavior of people with autism extends to situations that are commonly scripted, one wonders whether a partial explanation might be either absent or deficient scriptal representations. Twenty-four relatively high-functioning subjects with autism were compared to typically developing children who had been selected to be similar to the autistic subjects in terms of nonverbal mental age and language level. All subjects were presented with a series of three tasks designed to assess the presence of cognitive social scripts. Results indicated that basic scriptal knowledge was intact but that reliable differences in expressive language persisted.