Interesting article. DS (now 6) has had the term "autism" or "asperger's" thrown around by various people ever since he was a preschooler. He did have some interesting quirks/delays but I believe that they can mainly be attributed to uneven brain maturation and/or developmental coordination disorder/dyspraxia. There is an overlap between autism and many other disorders (like dyspraxia). Perhaps the kids in the study should never have been diagnosed with autism, but auditory processing disorder instead. And maybe auditory processing disorder improves with age. I also think that many psychs/"professionals" are slapping the autism label around too freely. When I took DS recently to a neuropsych he said that if I had taken him elsewhere he could have easily had an Asperger's label thrown on him because of some of his mannerisms (like flapping his hands and his odd voice prosody) but DS did just fine on a test of reading others emotions and the Asperger's rating scale for parents/teacher.
I found the book "The Einstein Syndrome" fascinating in respect to a small percentage of late talkers outgrowing their delays. Often these kids were misdiagnosed with autism and then grew out of the autism by the time they entered elem school (because they never had autism in the first place). DS was never actually diagnosed with anything but "delays" but easily could have been misdiagnosed and fits the profile in that book almost perfectly.
