This disorder can have a profound impact on an individual's ability to establish and maintain relationships, navigate social situations, and participate in academic and professional settings.
However, they usually have problems understanding and producing connected discourse, instead giving conversational responses that are socially inappropriate, tangential, and stereotyped.
This would mean that obvious, concrete instructions are clearly understood and carried out, whereas simple but non-literal expressions such as jokes, sarcasm, and general social chatting are difficult and can lead to misinterpretation.
Lies are also a confusing concept to children with SCD as it involves knowing meaning beyond a literal interpretation.
Joanne Volden wrote an article in 2002 comparing the linguistic weaknesses of children with a nonverbal learning disability to PLI.
The differential diagnosis of SPCD allows practitioners to account for social and communication difficulties which occur to a lesser degree than in children with autism.
[12] Social communication disorder is distinguished from autism by the absence of any history (current or past) of restricted or repetitive patterns of interest or behavior in SPCD.
[13] In 1983, Rapin and Allen suggested the term "semantic pragmatic disorder" to describe the communicative behavior of children who presented traits such as pathological talkativeness, deficient access to vocabulary and discourse comprehension, atypical choice of terms, and inappropriate conversational skills.
[14] They referred to a group of children who presented with mild autistic features and specific semantic pragmatic language problems.
[15][16] Rapin and Allen's definition has been expanded and refined by therapists who include communication disorders that involve difficulty in understanding the meaning of words, grammar, syntax, prosody, eye gaze, body language, gestures, or social context.
[22] In terms of Specific language impairment, there tend to be a lot of similarities between SCPD and PLI but SLI deals with Semantic-Pragmatic issues.