My kid who is now 10 had some similarities but also differences. He had a speech delay but it wasn't language so much as actual speech production. He scored very high for receptive language ability but not expressive. There was a gap. He was very inarticulate, hard to understand, dropped endings off words, had problems combining words. But he seemed to understand directions just fine, he would watch shows like thomas the train and seem to understand (and then do imaginative play with his own trains). When I did the MCHAT he was kind of borderline. He was a very quiet kid and lost in his own explorations. He wasn't obsessed with anything in particular, but seemed to know all the numbers, letters, etc. (and when he was around 3 1/2 he began sounding out words, could recognize most of the sight words, etc. and when he started K he was reading at around a 3rd grade level). In 4 year old preschool he could solve math problems like "If you have 37 trees in your yard and I cut down 16 how many are left?" But he seemed to learn these types of skills like math and reading without being all that interested. I didn't even know he could read until I showed him a list of sight words and was shocked when he read the list. Whenever he got excited he would flap his hands (for instance, if he was about to jump off a diving board). He would walk on the balls of his feet and still does that sometimes. He was ultimately diagnosed as having muscle weakness and low tone and a chiari malformation. Turns out that a lot of kids with chiari malformations have autistic like traits, speech issues, etc. But a chiari malformation is compression of the cerebellum. Thats a totally different mechanism than whatever causes autism. I guess my point is that you just need to keep your eye on him...maybe treat the symptoms like you would if he had autism but it's probably too early to tell. It would be helpful to have a neuropsych eval (make sure you go to someone reputable and research-based, like at a university). We had various evals for autism and they basically all said DS didn't meet the criteria despite the fact that he was flapping, toe walking, he had sporadic eye contact, some social issues, etc.
