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Bottema-Beutel, K., Zisk, A. H., Zimmerman, J., & Yu, B. (2025). Conceptualizing and describing autistic language: Moving on from ‘verbal’, ‘minimally verbal’ and ‘nonverbal’. Autism, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613251332573
Several researchers have rightly pointed out that, historically, the needs of many autistic people have not been reflected in autism scholarship and support practices (Tager-Flusberg & Kasari, 2013). Much of this concern has focused on the lack of sufficient attention to addressing the needs of ‘nonverbal’ and ‘minimally verbal’ autistic people. These terms are put in quotes, because there is currently no consistently used criteria for fitting autistic people within these subgroups (Koegel et al., 2020). What is held in common across most uses of these terms is a focus on the number of words an autistic person speaks. Definitions vary, but usually specify a maximum threshold of spoken word vocabulary (e.g. under 20 spoken words for minimally verbal, under 5 spoken words for nonverbal), and may note phrase use (e.g. Mirenda, 2013; Zisk et al., 2024), but differ on the values of these thresholds and the assessments used to determine whether a person meets them. For example, some researchers use parent reports indicating whether a child has ever spoken a given word (e.g. Fenson et al., 2006). Other researchers code naturalistic language samples for the number of unique words spoken by a child while interacting with a caregiver or trained examiner (Bal et al., 2016). Most definitions consider only spoken words and exclude words produced via other modalities such as AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) devices. In addition, they may also exclude forms of speech commonly used by autistic people, such as echolalia, which refers to the repetition of others’ speech; and gestalt speech, which refers to speech that is learned and produced as whole phrases rather than as individual words (Haydock et al., 2024; Koegel et al., 2020). Similarly, school-based professionals often consider only spoken words when defining these terms (Zisk et al., 2024).
We, a neurodiverse team of scholars, professionals, and advocates – some of whom use speech to communicate and some of whom use AAC some or all of the time – align with the underlying sentiments that the communicative needs of autistic people are not currently being met, and that this may be especially consequential for autistic people who use little or no speech. Note that from here forward, we use the terms ‘non-speaking’ or ‘minimally speaking’, because they are preferred over ‘nonverbal’ and ‘minimally verbal’ by autistic people these terms attempt to describe (Zimmerman, 2022; Zisk & Konyn, 2022) and, as we argue below, non-speaking and minimally speaking are more accurate descriptors. We propose that there are many issues with the constructs nonverbal and minimally verbal, including how they are named, conceptualized, measured, and used, that may hamper research, practice, and policy efforts aimed at improving the lives of the autistic people who purportedly belong to these groups.
