An online survey of community member views and priorities
Audrey Linden, Courtenay Norbury, Molly McCabe, Jo Saul, Estelle Killick, Evelyn Sam, Simone Dufresne, Freya Elise, Kurinchi Gurusamy and Laura Crane (2026)
Language interventions should enable autistic people to self advocate and engage with the world in a way that they wish. So these interventions should both work, and be meaningful.
This research is the first community consultation focused on language interventions of autistic people. It shows that members of the autism community value language as crucial, that non-autistic people need to share the burden of improving communication for autistic people and, that interventions need to be designed to ensure that autistic people keep both their agency and have opportunities to interact with the wider, neurotypical, world.
The researchers, with lived experience or prior professional experience in autism and language interventions, held an online survey of 356 people. The participants consisted of autistic adults, parents of autistic children, and language professionals.
Three core themes were consistently identified by the participants:
- language is not the only form of communication,
- autistic people live in a neurotypical world,
- autistic people should be put first in these language interventions.
They were told about the importance of language as a tool for fulfilling the everyday basic needs of autistic people. With it, autistic people can effectively express themselves, their needs and feeling, as well as being key to the forming and maintaining of relationships with others. Additionally, parents of autistic children saw verbal language as imperative to their child’s autonomy and independence.
Despite the evident importance of verbal communication, it is not the only form of communication that is used in day to day life. They suggested that interventions should be given to neurotypical people as well so they can understand how autistic people communicate; rather than being forced to adhere to forms of communication that might be challenging. Avoiding of harm is crucial for interventions: suggesting that autistic people need to learn to communicate like neurotypical is harmful because the process of masking can be exhausting.
“Autistic people don’t live on autism island”
Participants emphasised that autistic people have their own individual ways of communication but they live in a world catered to neurotypical individuals and their ways of communication. This means that autistic people often have to shoulder the burden of modifying how they communicate to conform to neurotypical ideals. Participants argued that this unequal burden needs to shift and that the responsibilities of improving communication needs to be shared between autistic and non-autistic people.
The importance of giving autistic people the space to be themselves and retaining their agency over their sense of self and how they communicate was greatly emphasised in the data. Autistic people called for language interventions to be tailored for and by autistic people to ensure that both needs and opportunities are appropriately considered.
Summary by Finn Gaffney
Linden, A., Norbury, C., McCabe, M., Saul, J., Killick, E., Sam, E., Dufresne, S., Elise, F., Gurusamy, K. and Crane, L. (2026). ‘Language interventions for autistic people: An online survey of community member views and priorities’. JCPP Advances, p. e70125. doi: 10.1002/jcv2.70125.