Why Your Autistic Student's Answer Doesn't Match Your Question
Your autistic student's "off" answer may not be a listening problem — it's retrieval. Learn the difference and the one phrase that changes everything.
They Weren't Ignoring You. They Couldn't Retrieve It.
You ask an autistic student, "What do you want to eat?" They answer, "We're at home." You ask again, slower this time, sure they misheard you. They still can't give you what sounds like a real answer.
It's tempting to write that off as not listening, or worse, not understanding. But an autism receptive language assessment built on comprehension scores alone can miss the actual barrier: a retrieval problem, not a receptive one. The student may know the answer and still not be able to reach it — because their brain isn't making the connection you expect it to make.
In the video above, Susan Golubock — an autistic, retired occupational therapist and co-founder of Making Sense of Autism — walks through exactly what's happening underneath an answer like "we're at home," why it's a logical response from inside an autistic brain, and the one phrase she teaches clients to use instead. Below, we break down what that means for how you assess and support the students in front of you.
Why "We're At Home" Is a Perfectly Logical Answer
When Susan first heard that exchange, her brain didn't file it as a wrong answer. It filed it as an incomplete question. "At home we have certain options, but if we go out, we have other options," she explains. "So you're asking what our options are, because we're home."
The adult asking the question assumes a chain of connections: you're home → you know the fridge → you know what's in it → you can name a food. For many autistic individuals, that chain doesn't hold. As Susan puts it, "my autistic brain has struggles with consistency in making connections... through my memory banks." The student isn't refusing to answer. They're telling you, in the most literal way they can, "what are my options?" — it just doesn't come out sounding like a question.
Retrieval Is Not the Same Barrier as Comprehension
This distinction matters enormously for how SLPs interpret assessment results. A student can understand a question completely and still not be able to pull the answer out of memory on demand. Susan is direct about it: "it's not necessarily a receptive language issue... it's really that retrieval, it's the connection issue."
That means two students can score identically on a receptive language autism assessment for very different reasons — one because they didn't understand, one because they understood perfectly and couldn't retrieve the response fast enough, or at all, in that moment. Standardized tools rarely separate the two, which is exactly the gap our Social Communication Profile was built to close — it looks specifically at the social communication piece a comprehension score can't see.
Skip the Chain. Go Straight to the Choices.
The practical fix Susan offers is simple: stop expecting the student to build the connection you built. Build it for them.
Instead of "What do you want to eat?" — which requires them to mentally travel from home to fridge to contents to word — go straight to: "Here are your choices: bologna sandwich, peanut butter and jelly, or soup." That's concrete, and it removes several links from a chain the student can't complete on their own.
"One of the most important phrases you can teach a kid is, 'What are my choices?'" Susan says. Teaching a student to ask that question directly gives them a self-advocacy tool that works far beyond mealtime — in the classroom, during therapy, anywhere an open-ended question creates a wall instead of an opening.
Why Visuals Change Everything for Retrieval
Susan points to visual supports as the single biggest shift in her own clinical practice. When she paired a spoken question with an AAC device or a visual communication board — a page of food images, for instance — clients who'd been stuck on open-ended questions suddenly had a way in. "That is when my client easily was like, 'Okay, that's what she's talking about... I can answer.'"
She describes one family who put a photo menu on the fridge after noticing their son couldn't answer "what do you want to eat" verbally. Over time, the visual scaffold built the connection strongly enough that he could eventually answer without it. That's the goal of a visual support — not a permanent crutch, but a bridge while the connection gets built.
"We can remember what we see far better than what we hear," Susan notes, "because auditory processing is not usually a strength" for many autistic individuals. If you know a student leans visual, don't wait until they're stuck to bring in support — build it into how you ask questions from the start.
What This Means for Assessment and Goal-Writing
If a comprehension score can't tell you why a student didn't respond, it also can't tell you what to do next. Susan is blunt about the consequence: "we create a goal, and we still bang our heads because we're like, 'why aren't they making progress?'"
This is the piece a standard assessment structurally cannot capture — strengths, barriers, and the individual supports a student has already built for themselves (like Susan's own habit of writing everything down because her working memory won't hold spoken information). It's also exactly what we cover in How Do I Make a Social Communication Assessment More Neuro-Affirming? and How do I assess social communication in autistic students? — both look at what standardized tools miss and how to build goals around the actual barrier instead of the score.
Don't Mistake Inconsistency for Non-Compliance
One more pattern worth naming: a student who retrieves information one day and not the next isn't being inconsistent on purpose. Stress, sensory load, regulation, and working memory all affect retrieval in the moment. "Sometimes they can," Susan says, "and then you think, 'well, you did it yesterday'... because one day they suddenly couldn't make that connection because of stress or something else."
That inconsistency is data, not defiance — and it's covered in more depth in What Standardized Autism Assessments Don't Tell You (And Why Your Goals M
FAQ
Is a retrieval problem the same as a receptive language delay?
No. A receptive language delay means the person doesn't understand what was said. A retrieval problem means they understand but can't access or produce the response — often due to memory, regulation, or connection differences, not comprehension.
What's the fastest way to support a student who can't answer open-ended questions?
Replace the open-ended question with a small set of concrete choices, ideally paired with a visual. "What are your choices?" is also a phrase worth teaching directly so the student can request support themselves.
Why does a student answer correctly one day and not the next?
Retrieval is affected by regulation, sensory load, and stress in the moment — it isn't a stable, all-or-nothing skill. Inconsistent responses usually mean a barrier is present sometimes, not that the student is being non-compliant.
Do visual supports have to be permanent?
No. Visuals often function as a bridge while a connection is being built. Some clients need them indefinitely; others, like the child in this video, eventually answer without the visual once the connection is established.
See the Barrier Behind the Behavior
A comprehension score tells you what a student did in one moment. It won't tell you why — and that's the piece that actually changes your goals. If you want an assessment approach built to catch that difference, take a look at the Social Communication Profile.
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