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It’s all in the timing: a piece of advice useful for comedians, actors and maybe even teenagers with autism trying to connect with their peers.

Difficulty with communication is a generally accepted symptom of autism and probably stems from a number of features of the disorder, such as deficits in language and lack of eye contact. Doctors also report that people with autism don’t use illustrative gestures along with their speech.

But scientific studies do not back up this observation, finding that people with autism use just as many gestures as do those without the disorder.

Although teenagers with autism use as many gestures as their typically developing peers do, their gestures do not improve their stories and are poorly linked to the words they wish to illustrate, according to a study published in December in Autism Research.

Researchers gave 20 teenagers with autism and 16 typically developing controls a series of six cards illustrating the outline of a story: two monkeys fighting over coconuts. The teenagers told the story to observers who neither knew the teenagers’ diagnosis, nor to look for their gestures. The observers then rated the story based on how engaging the story was and how easy it was to follow.

As one would expect, teenagers with autism tell less engaging stories, and this inability correlates with the severity of their diagnosis. Also not surprisingly, typical teenagers tell better stories when they use more gestures.

The researchers watched tapes of the stories and scored the amount of time between a gesture and the word it was illustrating. The quality of the story improves in both groups when word and gesture are closely linked, confirming that good timing makes a story more engaging. Teenagers with autism, however, show delays between word and gesture that are as much as six times longer than those of typically developing controls.

One interesting implication of the study is that people with autism may have trouble integrating verbal and non-verbal information. The researchers refer to a study published in June that found that people with autism are slower to identify a photograph when an informative gesture is included along with a verbal description.

What I find more promising is that the study identifies a possible fix. As comedians know, ‘improve your timing’ is easier advice to follow than just ‘be funnier.’