Autism was originally reported in 1943 by Leo Kanner in an article in which he described eleven cases of ''autistic disturbance of affective contact and desire for preservation of sameness''. The symptoms he described from the core of the classification of autism today. The social abnormality includes the child's inability to reciprocate in social interactions, to form or develop loving relationships and to interact spontaneously with others. Autism children and adults have an impairment in the appreciation of social cues.
One characteristic feature of autism is the inability to look for emotion in the behavior or expression of others; this may give autism children an aloof and cold demeanor because the may be judged emotionally unresponsive. In an experiment in which autistic and control children were asked to sort pictures of individuals according to a category, autistic children would sort by appearance rather than emotion. The impairment in interpersonal communication, however, appears to be limited to interpersonal understanding, not all social communication is impaired
Language development in autism is severely delayed and about half of autistics do not develop useful language. In addition to this delay, there is evidence of deviant communication in the form of the idiosyncratic use of language, making up of new words (neologising)
Also see the development of autism at http://self-
