Semantic Pragmatic Disorder

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I know that I don't have asperger's syndrome and that there is debate as to whether SPD is actually an autistic spectrum disorder (although I believe it is, a 'mild' version, so to speak). However there are so few places that I may discuss this condition with other people like myself. Anyway the following is what I have experienced in the past and has been copied and pasted from another forum. I feel that SPD is actually quite similar in a lot of ways to asperger's so if anyone with a similar experience to me would like to chip in, please do so.

I personally have been diagnosed with SPD since I was about 3 or 4 years old and at times I have to admit, it has made life very difficult. It was my mother who organised for me to be diagnosed because I was so late talking and rarely decided to speak. I often had trouble interacting with the other children and I went to several different primary schools (this would be elementary school in the US?) as a result. I remember always trying to be one of 'the gang' and always being rejected, then I used to bring a ball into school to play games of football (soccer) but always used to get it pinched. When ever I did play ballgames with the other kids I would use to insist that they play the rules exactly, e.g. that with basketball, no-one was to hold the ball (although I didn't know it but this was not strictly speaking true!). I remember that when I moved to a new school (as a result of this, and also some of the teachers' attitudes), my parents agreed with the school that they explain my disability to the other children their. However this was a bad idea: on the first day, everyone came up to me and started asking me questions like 'Do you know what "pig" means? Do you know what a "sheep" means?' I had no idea what this was all about, of course, but when I realised, and tried explaining my learning difficulties, I could not use the right words to explain correctly. This ended up in a dialogue as so:

Him: 'Is it true you don't understand what words mean?',

Me: 'No - I understand what words are I just don't understand what words mean bunched up together' (i.e. found it hard to understand the meaning of complete sentences or complicated language)

Him: 'Huh? So you know what words mean but you don't?'

I also used to get asked if I had problems. I think I can safely say that secondary school (highschool) were the worst 5 years of my life. I was bullied for being different and we used to play games like Rugby, both games, which now I am actually quite good at, but there were always complicated rules that went along with them. The teacher used to spend about an hour explaining all of these rules (or so it seemed to me) and I used to get completely baffled by them and do everything completely wrong. Then everyone would shout at me and mock me. American Football was even worse, because the teacher would shout Red, Blue - 64, Orange, Red - 79, (then do some sort of signal with his leg) and then shout HUT! And everyone had these complicated tasks to do. Red - 79 would mean go forward 7 strides, turn right, go forward 9 strides and catch the ball, but I once ran forward 7 strides (too slow), because I was completely confused turned around and the ball had hit me in the face. In fact I don't think I had to run 9 strides right, I was just again utterly baffled. There was another signal once I had to carry out where he started moving his leg up and down: I was supposed to run behind the line-up, take the ball off of him then run through a gap in the crowdand score touch-down. Instead I started running in front of the line, and this was not for half a minute until after he had been doing that thing with his leg. I had waited for this long because I thought that I had to go after he said hut, and I ran infront of the line-up because I thought I had to catch it.

In chemistry the teacher also used to waffle on for about an hour and a half and everyone else there would just be able to listen, understand perfectly and then carry on with the task he had set them. Me, I sat there completely clueless and my friend told me it was because I didn't listen. In other subjects if I ever asked the person sitting by me for help (basically 'What are we supposed to do') he'd tell me that I needed to listen. In English, I'd also struggle to read through the books quick enough to answer the questions on them. I remember one lesson we had to read through one chapter and then answer the questions on them. This would have been fine but I had to share the book with the person sitting next to me. He would wizz through each page, whilst I was still stuck on the first paragraph and then put his finger on the page to turn it over and start breathing and tapping impatiently because he wanted to go onto the next page. So I had to pretend that I'd read it (well reading it wasn't the problem, it was understanding the content of the language. Basically I could read it faster than I could actually understand the content. I believe this is because of something called hyperlexia that is said to come with or be associated with semantic pragmatic disorder.) and then after we had got to the end of the chapter, I'd try to answer the questions, but realise I couldn't because I had simply been reading the words and not being able to understand the meaning of them. Then I would have to read it all again and waste further time whilst the person next to me finished all of the questions and had time to 'mess around' and I would have extra homework. The next year in English, the teacher would also write notes on the board and I would try to write them all down as fast as her. I would keep asking her to stop/slow down (and it turned out she actually admired this) but the person behind me, who I now believe was probably hyperactive and had ADHD or something kept being really rude and shouting loudly at me to stop it, etc. I spoke to the teacher after class one day about it, I believe I was trying to subtly hint (which of course I'm no good at) to her to slow down the speed that she was writing down the notes at but she thought that I was asking her if it bothered her that I kept asking her to slow down and she replied that she would be dissapointed if I was to stop doing what I had been. Throughout secondary school I always tried to knock about with a bunch of people and they hated me because I would try to be funny, like they were (and fail), I couldn't keep up with conversations they were having, and I believe that I would often appear a bit arrogant just because I didn't know any better and would try to be friendly but would actually end up doing things like butting in on conversations, etc. I went the entire 5 years, trying to convince my parents that I had friends. I also had help off of a learning support, and other people would often poke fun at that. There was one person who asked me once if my learning support was my 'personal paedophile'. I know, that's pretty sick, right. We had told the school that I wanted discreet support, meaning that I wanted the LSA (learning support assistant) to sit at the corner of the room and take notes about what was happening in lesson (for me to read over later and make sure I understood the lesson), so nobody would notice he was there for me. Instead however they got in a chappy who would wait outside of lessons for me and take me in with him. He would sit next to me and he would insist that I met him up after school everyday, without trying to be at all discrete about it, and making me go home half an hour late. I remember I got a 'homework stamp' in my diary one day for forgetting to bring in the work (I had done it). This person, the LSA then made me explain why I had forgotten to bring it in after school. (I am very forgetful and always doing stupid things like leaving bags, wallets, laptops on public transport or back at college, and believe this is part of my SPD.) I remember that he said that if he had been my age he would have been very upset if he had gotten an homework stamp in his diary.

That pretty much summed up secondary school. I actually worked hard and got really good results in my end examinations, with the help of my mum who is very intelligent and could help me with things like English, Latin etc. (not so much the translation part, though she had got me kick-started with that when I was 11 and had first begun secondary school, but more the analysing literature part).

Now at 18 I would love more than anything to meet people in real life who have had the same difficulties as me with socialising: when I am talking with people in large groups I just keep losing focus on what they say and the sounds become like a large room of bees buzzing. And even if I can understand the meaning of their words it would be pointless trying to speak because no words come to my mind. In college everything is fine now; people do not pick on me, but I am still upset that I cannot really develop relationships with people. I have had a few friends throughout my life and they have come and gone and I have a few friends still now, but I have never really been able to keep many friends or ever had a best friend or ever been particularly invited out to parties, etc. I don't completely blame this on my SPD because I know that other people have worse with me and manage to get on just fine with life, I blame it more on circumstances that I was unwittingly thrown into combined with the fact I had SPD (according to wikipedia, they now call this PLI, pragmatic language impairment?). My mother says I could probably meet more people and have a more dynamic social life if I wanted, I am just too shy, but I don't feel like I am shy, I feel that I can't go upto other people for fear that I would make a fool of myself. I often feel foolish when I am around other people and they are all having a conversation amongst themselves, and I can't get a word in edge ways, and perhaps, after my experiences in the past, I don't wish to be hanging around people for the fear that they might not actually like me and are just too polite to tell me otherwise.

This lengthy text all seems rather depressing; I don't actually mean it to be so and my life has not been all that bad, I have just decided to tell the bad bits. I just wanted to share my story really, and more than anything perhaps see if there was anyone around on the internet who had a similar story and just wanted to share their experiences, since I cannot seem to find anyone in real life who is like me.

Welcome to WP!

I have Asperger's, not SPD, but some of your story sounds all too familiar. Like you, I had/have trouble keeping up when taking notes. What trips me up is that I don't know what to write down, because you can't write down every single bit of information. I have trouble distinguishing between unimportant details and central stories/concepts. It's quite annoying.

Gym class in 6th-8th grade: I don't know how I survived. The teacher just assumed that everyone knew how to play and acted impatient when I asked about the rules. (Didn't matter which game. Football (American football, not soccer), baseball, volleyball... you name it, I was the only kid who didn't know how to play it.) And then when I made a mistake, or just stood there because I had no clue what was happening, the other kids would yell at me, telling me what to do and calling me names at the same time. And because they were all yelling at once, I couldn't understand anything anybody said, and that only increased their anger...
So glad we can take online/ at home gym class in high school.

Hazelm wrote:

Internet gym class topic

I would have loved that when I was a teen!

Hi there,

I have Asperger's and I would probably be a medal contender in the Semantic Pragmatic Disorder Olympics


Welcome to the cruise (Judy Tsuke 1979; Rocket Records)

This is perhaps unusual of people on the autistic spectrum, generally speaking, but I am now fairly good at sports, or some sports anyway. I love rugby but find catching difficult. I also snowboard/surf amongst other things. I've always been rubbish at football (soccer) and my Dad once said that in tennis I am like an octopus with a frying pan! Oddly enough though I'm alright at badmington. And I know completely what you mean about note taking and having to get down everything that they are saying/not being able to distinguish between the important and irrelevant information (at least I find). I love lessons where the teacher writes on the board because it forces them to slow down a little.

Does anyone else here find that they are very forgetful? I left my laptop in college a couple of weeks ago but luckily it was in the lost property (won't be doing that again because I'm too scared to bring my laptop back in!) Or perhaps it has nothing to do with my autism, rather just an absent mind, although I heard that Einstein once actually forgot where he lived and had to be escorted back home!

It seems a shame that it is so hard to communicate/find other people with SPD on the internet (or in life for that matter) but reading around here and places, I realise asperger's syndrome is not so different to what I have.

I think Semantic-Pragmatic Disorder is actually on the spectrum, but not officially? I have looked up SPD (Which also can mean Sensory Processing Disorder) But I read that S-PD is on the higher functioning side of Autism like Asperger's Syndrome is, the difference is people who have Semantic-Pragmatic Disorder as far as I know are a bit more social and have less social difficulties than those with Asperger's.

Yes that is fairly accurate, there is more information here which I find to be fairly accurate: http://www.hyperlexia.org/sp1.html

Sensory processing disorder is different to semantic pragmatic disorder though; it is people who find the feel of their clothes, as well as other things such as showers, crowds, etc. uncomfortable/irritating to the touch of their skin. They have the same abbreviation which is confusing, I know, and makes an already difficult topic to research even more so!

I wouldn't say there is less social difficulties, sometimes there are more. The difference with SPD is there is more of an interest to be social, even when it can be harmful. The language difficulties with SPD are unique...there is alot of repeating the same question, odd topics, etc. I was diagnosed with it and NLVD as a child, recently the diagnosis was changed to PDD-NOS. (Just to note issues with both can be co-moribund, i have seen it in quite a few case studies.)

I can definately relate to alot of what the OP wrote...at least the broad difficulties.

SPD is just an atypical manifestation of autism. In the US the issues with SPD are almost universally diagnosed as PDD-NOS. In fact SPD is the most common reason for that diagnosis as far as I can tell. There were very few diagnosed in the US with this, I was just diagnosed purely because that and NLVD best described my problems at the time, and this was in the early eighties. Both SPD and NLVD were both rather new concepts.

I agree although not sure what you mean about it being harmful. I was tempted to say that the being more sociable thing was more of a desire but I was not completely sure. I have read a lot that people on the autistic spectrum did not actually want (generally speaking) to actually socialise. This was never something I felt I related to or possibly even understand. I have always desired a large social circle. I am often told that the friends (non autistic) people usually make at my age, areusually superficial anyway, meaning that they do not generally communicate or communicate with a lot of them later in life. This was to cheer me up but I felt, and still feel that it is something I would like to experience whilst still young.

The whole Autistic people don't want to socialize is a half-truth in a sense. I know most people with Asperger's (not all!) desire to have friends, but have a hard time making them and keeping them. Most people with Classic Autism have no desire to socialize, or are very unaware of social situations. Though I know most people who are considered in the High Functioning Area of Classic Autism do like to be social but with one person, or with their caretaker.. no one else. Or thats what I have been told.

I don't like to socialize all that much unless I'm a) going to Starbucks. b) going to the last showing of a movie (as in like 10:15-12:00 showings, less crowds) c) on a walk with my mom and Susan. But generally I dont like to go out and hang out with a lot of people. Meh, I would like to get invited places, but chances are i would say no anyway. lol

Haha I always ask the same question because the answer is never good enough!