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Clearer Communication

Communication is central to effective functioning in workplaces. Clear expectations, shared understanding, and reliable feedback processes are foundational to productivity, collaboration, and equity. Yet communication breakdowns remain among the most frequently reported challenges in professional environments, often described using vague labels such as “poor communication,” “lack of professionalism,” or “culture fit issues.”

These challenges disproportionately affect autistic and other neurodivergent individuals. Despite increasing awareness of neurodiversity, many organizations continue to treat communication difficulties as individual shortcomings rather than systemic design problems. As a result, well-qualified individuals are frequently subjected to remediation efforts -such as social skills training, coaching, or informal correction – without meaningful improvement in outcomes.

The Differential Social Learning Trajectories (A-DSLT) framework is a practitioner-oriented theory that reframes communication breakdowns as predictable outcomes of mismatches between how people learn social rules and how institutions communicate expectations.

The A-DSLT framework helps teams reduce miscommunication by making expectations explicit, observable, and fair, enabling neurodiverse individuals to contribute fully without masking. it can inform more inclusive, effective, and ethical communication practices

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We partner with managers, HR, and teams to implement the A-DSLT framework in real work contexts, aligning standards with explicit communication styles, enhancing collaboration within and between all neuro-types.

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A-DSLT Framework

Leadership & Policy Consulting: separate “clarity” from “competence”

Training and Coaching of Practitioners and Staff: one

Audit: identify where inference is required

The A-DSLT framework helps practitioners diagnose miscommunications and self-enforcing destructive loops, guiding leaders to redesign systems so expectations are visible, fair, and consistent for both neurotypical and neurodivergent individuals and their teams.

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Communication Audits

We analyze channels, cadence, and language to surface where confusion arises and how to redesign systems for clarity.

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Autistic communication has long been described in clinical, educational, and social science literatures through a deficit-based lens emphasizing impairments in social inference, pragmatic language, and mental-state reasoning. These perspectives have shaped diagnostic criteria, informed therapeutic interventions, and influenced public attitudes toward autism. Yet a growing body of empirical evidence contradicts the universality of these claims. Autistic-autistic interactions are often fluent, coherent, and high in mutual comprehension; laboratory studies reveal that autistic individuals perform comparably to or better than non-autistic peers on structured, explicit social tasks; and cross-neurotype miscommunication often arises not from autistic cognitive failure but from divergent communicative expectations and mismatched assumptions. This body of evidence demands an updated theoretical account capable of explaining both the unique strengths of autistic communication and the difficulties that arise in cross-neurotype contexts. The Autism-Specific Differential Social Learning Trajectories (A-DSLT) model developed in this dissertation addresses this theoretical gap. A-DSLT proposes that autistic and non-autistic social communication differences emerge from fundamentally different dominant learning pathways. Non-autistic individuals rely heavily on implicit learning mechanisms that absorb social norms through early, unstructured exposure. Autistic individuals, by contrast, rely more heavily on explicit, analytic learning mechanisms, acquiring social knowledge through deliberate reasoning, explanation, and conscious attention to structure. These divergent developmental pathways shape the internalization, representation, and application of social rules, which in turn create distinct communication modalities: implicit, inferential, and subtextual for non-autistic individuals, and explicit, precise, and low-ambiguity for autistic individuals. A-DSLT reframes autistic communication differences not as deficits but as logical products of explicit developmental learning. This model accounts for observed patterns such as delayed-but more exact-social rule acquisition in autistic individuals; strong autistic performance in explicit, structured contexts; and communication fluency among autistic peers. It further provides a mechanistic explanation for the Double Empathy Problem-a research framework demonstrating that autistic and non-autistic individuals frequently misunderstand one another not because of autistic social impairment but because of mismatched communication norms. A-DSLT identifies modality mismatch as the downstream result of divergent learning histories and positions miscommunication as relational rather than intrapersonal. This dissertation elaborates the full theoretical architecture of A-DSLT, evaluates its testability, and articulates its implications for research, intervention, and policy. A comprehensive empirical plan is provided, including structural equation modeling, multi-group comparison across neurotypes, dyadic interaction paradigms, and cross-contextual experimental designs. The dissertation further advances a large-scale applied framework for neurodiversity-affirming practice, with special focus on workplace environments where implicit, unspoken rules are ubiquitously privileged. The A-DSLT model demonstrates that modifying institutional structures-rather than seeking to normalize autistic behavior-is the most effective pathway to reduce miscommunication and promote equity. The model’s contribution is theoretical, empirical, and applied. It provides a non-pathologizing mechanistic foundation for autism research, integrates developmental learning science with interactional theories of communication, supports neurodiversity-aligned practice, and extends the emerging scientific understanding that autistic communication is not “deficient” but differently organized. A-DSLT offers a generative research agenda and a blueprint for institutional change, with the potential to reshape clinical, educational, and workplace approaches to autism in ways aligned with respect, accessibility, and justice.

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