Dissociations between language and cognition: cases and implications.

McCann (1981) looked at case studies of children who had uneven language skills. The paper asked: can grammar grow on its own while other thinking skills stay behind?

The author compared grammar rules with word meaning. The goal was to see which part of language needs general cognition and which does not.

Grammar can march ahead even when broader cognition lags. Word meaning, however, stays tied to general thinking skills.

In short: teach sentence frames even if the child struggles with basic concepts, but tie new words to real-world experiences.

Palmer (2023) extends the idea. It gives a behavior-analytic reason: grammar is just autoclitic frames under contextual control. The 1981 claim gets a Skinnerian update.

Kritsotakis et al. (2026) and Kelley et al. (2006) add real data. Both teams show autistic children who have decent grammar yet still stumble on figurative or pragmatic language. The split lives outside case studies.

Vierck et al. (2015) seems to disagree. High-functioning Mandarin-speaking autistic kids mastered logical words like “some.” Their semantic skill looked intact. The clash fades when you see the group was high IQ; the 1981 claim may hold for broader semantic systems, not narrow logical items.

You can write separate goals for syntax and semantics. Work on complex sentence frames while you also teach concept-heavy vocabulary in real routines. Check both areas in your reassessments; one can jump before the other.