Autism affects the gesture production, but the relation to language development still exists. Parent's verbal responces in responce to what a child with ASD was focusing on tends to have better language outcomes compared to attempting to redirect focus.

Children with ASD are just as likely to request objects through gestures as children with TD. Parents are also just as likely to respond to the requests in a timely maner compared to parents of children with TD. Parental translation of the gestures had similarly psoitive effects in developing vocabulary.

There are high levels of variation in this research with the behaviors of children with ASD, with aproximately 1/3 of children with ASD unable to show improvement due to being preverbal or nonverbal.