Hebrew Grammar in Autistic Teens: Almost a Breakthrough — Until the Frame Took Over
If you go hunting for flaws you’ll miss the fluency right in front of you. In a study led by M.I. Lotsky, N. Sukenik and J. Reznick at the University of Haifa and affiliated Israeli research centers, 59 Hebrew-speaking teenagers — 29 autistic and 30 neurotypical — sat through drills on pluralization, verb tenses and agreement. Many autistic teens stood toe-to-toe with their peers especially in pluralization and future tense. For a moment, it looked like the paper might break the mold — a rare chance to push back on deficit narratives and highlight how autistic communication thrives in one of the world’s most complex languages. But the turn never came. The wins were framed as anomalies, not as evidence of linguistic legitimacy. In our communities that’s just everyday language. In theirs it’s a surprise worth footnoting. The frame is the real deficit here.
The paper splits the group into two profiles. One scored on-par across tasks. The other stumbled on the most complex patterns like past tense and mixed-tense verb inflection. These weren’t catastrophic failures — they were variations. But variation doesn’t fit neatly into a norm–gap binary so the conclusion becomes “tailored interventions” to close the gap.
What’s missing is any look at how these patterns function in the real world. How do these same teens communicate with friends, family and teachers? What happens to their so-called “gaps” when the conversation isn’t being timed and scored? The authors don’t ask. They’re busy measuring how far each teen sits from a non-autistic standard.
Harm mechanism: By defining success purely as conformity to non-autistic grammar norms the study erases the legitimacy of autistic linguistic strategies.
Beneficiary: The academic record and intervention programs that thrive on correcting what they’ve chosen to see as error.
We could have had a different headline here: proof that autistic teens navigate one of the world’s most morphologically rich languages with skill and creativity. Instead we get another deficit map. What happens if we stop asking autistic teens to match someone else’s speech and start asking how their speech matches them?