The Unmeasured Cost: What Five Established Findings Imply Together

Autistic communication difficulty is described throughout the clinical literature as a deficit in pragmatic ability. The field's own experimental results do not show this. On tasks requiring pragmatic inference, autistic adults perform at the same rates as non-autistic adults, a finding replicated across languages and treated in recent work as settled background. This paper assembles five findings, each uncontested within the literature that produced it, and none produced to answer a question about any of the others. Autistic adults derive pragmatic inferences at control rates. Resolving underspecified input consumes processing resources, and the amount consumed varies with how much the context supplies. That consumption is measurable in real time, and the relation between contextual support and measured effort has been demonstrated physiologically in non-autistic participants. Camouflaging carries a physiological cost, detected so far only through a marker integrating over months, using instruments that require the participant to notice what they are doing. And the accumulated outcome, autistic burnout, is documented across a large qualitative literature, with camouflaging identified among its contributors. Taken together these describe a situation the field has not named: two groups producing equivalent output on a task known to cost something, where one group has a separately documented history of paying more for equivalent output, and where the instrument capable of measuring what either group spends has been validated but never applied to the comparison. The paper introduces no new data and requires no new theoretical framework. Every substantive claim is a result the field has already published. The argument is that their conjunction implies a measurement that has not been made, and that the failure to make it has left a specific question unanswered: what does producing the same answer cost? If the answer is nothing, the parity findings mean what they appear to mean. If equivalent output is purchased at unequal cost, then a body of work measuring only output has been blind to the variable that matters, and the accumulated consequence of that expenditure has a proximate mechanism that can be measured directly rather than inferred from retrospective report. Deciding between these is a matter of measurement rather than of argument.