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by iamdbtoo 872 days ago
I think they are claiming the opposite and that autistic people don't lack theory of mind, but that the theory of mind claim is stemmed from their communication impaiarment. I am no expert, but I think they are trying to overcome the idea you're presenting.

> Because theory-of-mind tasks rely heavily on “fairly complex language” (San José Cáceres, Keren, Booth, & Happé, 2014, p. 608) and because autism, by diagnostic definition, involves communication impairment (Gernsbacher, Morson, & Grace, 2016), it is unsurprising that autistic participants with communication impairment perform less well than nonautistic participants without communication impairment. And because autistic people vary in their communication impairment (Gernsbacher, Geye, & Ellis Weismer, 2005), it is unsurprising that autistic people vary in their theory-of-mind task performance.