1) Are college students who have difficulties with organization truly "high functioning?" I have papers going back to the Eighties still lying around.
"High functioning" is a medical term which only means that while being on the spectrum you still manage to score 70 or more points in a general IQ test. In other words, you do not qualify as a mentally retarded person. (ICD-10 F 70)
98 % of the population are "high functioning"; that doesn't mean all of them are perfectly organized.
HFA & LFA are totally misleading terms of which I advocate the immediate disuse .
The differentiation between the two is movement, not IQ^
At least their more fortunate, apraxia-free kindred could extend to them the respect and compassion of not calling them LF and recognizing the ineptness of IQ testing for this group of auties.
It is a complex issue so I have included a web site for inquiring minds.
^It is nearly impossible to assess any kind of valid IQ (which is an often misunderstood concept, but I am using the commonly understood meaning: how smart a person is) for someone who has the double barriers of apraxia of body & speech**. So many who are called LFA are intelligent people being held hostage by their bodies and being treated like idiots. Please let me know if you’d like the APA discussion of IQ.
**Although I have personally heard Edith Strand (top researcher of speech apraxia) argue that people with autism who have movement difficulties (that frequently include speech) are not experiencing apraxia*....Nonetheless, the movement difficulties are extremely apraxic-like and can interfere with using speech, sign language, or independent typing as ways to communicate.
*For explanation for more information go to http://www.apraxia-kids.org/site/apps/nl...&ct=464119
I have also argued with Eddy & her friend, Rebecca McCauley that apraxia is a totally inaccurate term - it should more accurately be called dyspraxia. Apraxia is absolute and refers to no movement (so rare to be a nonexistent condition), while dyspraxia would include the entire continuum between minimal volitional movements to near typical (which is more accurate).
