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Description: The human faculty to generate an infinite set of structured expressions in language, present in most cultures and normal ontogenetic development, is the most substantial evidence of the human capacity for recursion. In contrast, strong evidence of this capacity in other domains has been sparse, inviting the speculation that recursion might be primarily linguistic and sometimes used in different domains via the linguistic cognitive machinery. Here, we present a case report of a minimally verbal 11-y.o. autistic child with poor language comprehension and whose production rarely exceeds two-word imperative utterances despite echolalic production of longer sequences. We tested whether this child could represent recursive hierarchical embedding in vision —despite its absence in language— and found that 1) his accuracy was above chance and 2) not significantly different from typically developing children. Importantly, this child has a strong capacity to detect visual patterns, expressed through hyperlexia, and an average score in conceptual visual tasks despite low fluid intelligence. Based on these results, we suggest that a core capacity of recursion interfacing with a sensory modality (vision) and a simple visuospatial conceptual system is sufficient to understand recursion in vision in vision. In contrast, linguistic recursion requires a more complex sensorimotor and conceptual-intentional machinery.