Autism is one of a group of three neuro- developmental disorders including, in addition to autism itself, Asperger Syndrome and a fairly heterogeneous group of patients who present some but not all of the symptoms of autism (see below, section 2.2). Asperger Syndrome and autism being the best described pathologies, notably in terms of language and language development, they will be the focus of our attention in what follows. Autism has been described as being to pragmatics what aphasia is to syntax, i.e., a natural testing ground for pragmatic hypotheses. This is certainly true of both Asperger's Syndrome and autism, though, as will shortly be seen, autistic people are more impaired in language acquisition. The first part of the paper (section 2) will describe the pathology; the second part (section 3), the impact of the social/socio? pragmatic deficit on language acquisition; the third part (section 4), the pragmatic deficits that remain in adulthood in Asperger and verbally autistic patients