Asperger's syndrome vs. High-functioning autism

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I think that one aspect of the communication abilities spectrum is the instinct for communication, or lack thereof. I am mostly passive now, after being aloof for most of my childhood, and part of my former aloofness was the lack of an instinct for communication, even in response to direct overtures of others. Since I had no natural instinct for communication, the idea of communicating through speech or gesture occurred to me very infrequently, and when someone asked me a direct question like "do you want pancakes", there was no answering through verbal or non-verbal means, because there was no they ask you answer communication instinct in my brain to drive the communication behavior. When someone called my name, and I didn't appear to notice that I had heard anything, it was because I didn't recognize the sound of my name as something that I was supposed to respond to, no they call you respond communication instinct. Same with gestures that people made at me. So what if they point at something for me to look at? I saw the physical movements of their arm, hand, and finger, and I looked at and followed these physical movements to the tip of their finger and not beyond, so I didn't look at the thing that they pointed at. In this context, it is hard for me to figure out whether I had the abilities that were not displayed due to lack of instinct or lack of instinct plus lack of abilities, but I do think that lack of instinct played a huge role in non-communication and aloofness. I started learning communication in the 8-10 year old range, but I am sure that I could have learned it earlier and spoken on my own and used gestures earlier, if I had been eggsplicitly taught what communication was through a combination of pictures and words, and if I had a prompting system, like a sign that someone held up to remind me that this is a time to communicate at the same time that they asked me a question or called me by name. The way that I learned communication was through learning a foreign language from children's books where you read the words out loud, and there is a picture to go along with each sentence, and you do repetitive drills from these books until you can speak the foreign language on your own. Also, it helped that a lot of the subject matter in these books and drills was communication itself, like people asking questions and other people answering questions or people greeting each other in foreign language. For some autistic children, receptive language and reading are less severely affected than eggspressive language, e.g. autistic child being able to read before speak, so teaching a child with low communication skills a first language like you would teach a normal child a foreign language might be effective for earlier development of communication skills. I don't know how my development would have gone if I had not learned a foreign language starting around age eight. I feel like this was eggstremely important in my development.