Autistic really comunicating or repeating memorized phrases?

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Jenna towards the beginning of the video appears to be classic autistic or severely autistic. Then she communicates by typing on a computer. Find out what she has to say by watching the video.


The video:
http://www.king5.com/v/?i=79855057

The page the video is on:
http://www.king5.com/health/childrens-h ... 55057.html


Does it seem like thats what she really is saying?

Alot of the things she says seem to not even be from her own point of view, but rather from her mother's, or the aid's point of view.


Jenna: "You can imagine what its like if you have a baby that is crying and you don't know what is wrong."
Jenna doesn't have a baby, why would she say that from that point of view, it does not sound like her own point of view, it sounds like something her mom would say, or want her to say for her.

Jenna: "I think that's how it is with the love between a parent and a child"
The end of that seemed not from her point of view and it seemed reversed
shouldn't she say "between a (1)child and a (2)parent" instead or "between my mother and I"

"(about her aid Janet)she is my favorite friend, with out her I would still live in my silent world"
It seems like someone on the outside (like Janet) would say she has a silent world. If Jenna really could talk, I don't think she would say she lived in some silent world.
And again, her statement seems to revolve around her aid (favorite friend), and not herself.

Jenna "I love to make my parents happy whenever I can because they spend so much of their life making me happy"
She keeps talking about her parents.
They (the parents) spend so much of their life on her? That sounds like what a parent would say who thinks they spend too much energy "putting up with" their autistic child. It doesn't seem like something Jenna would say.

This is my opinion, but it seems to me like she is memorizing phrases and sentences that her aid Janet gives her, and then she repeats them. Shes not actually saying any of that word for word of the top of her head.

She is talking like a chat bot.

Like this:
http://www.square-bear.co.uk/mitsuku/chat.htm
Mitsuku Chat Bot


Towards then end you could read this on the screen,
"I have a communication book that I use when Janet is not available."

Aid Janet: "helping her communicate ever since kinder garden"

1:16 She is even grabbing her arm and guiding it.

Now I'd consider the part at the beginning to be communication with the light, but other then that, I'd say she isn't saying what she wants to say, and she is trained to type things that her aid or her mom says for her. She doesn't have her own voice in things. This isn't language progress, its manipulation.

Often autistic people who have beenn given a way to communicate after so long without one, are so terrified it will be taken away (since it's the nonautistic people with the power) that they frenetically praise people who have that power. The same thing happens in developmental disability services satisfaction surveys, people overpraise what help they can get for fear of it being taken away. It is a terrible power issue that is not often addressed and I see it all the time. It also has to do with pressure on disabled people to be endlessly grateful and thinking about everyone's needs and wishes but our own, so as not to be punished or treated as the horrible "bitter cripple". I have seen similar attitudes in purely physically disabled people whose parents keep them in a back room and have total power over them. They have to appear incredibly passive, and are always talking about themselves from the point of view they imagine their parents as feeling about them.

I grew up just repeating stuff but I did it so well very few people guessed. (And that was due to a severe receptive language delay among other things). It took me nearly two decades to even begin to break free of "words are just puzzles of what other people expect to hear" into "words should match my thoughts". But since I was usually speaking nobody questioned it except my shrink when I was diagnosed. It certainly can happen but only the person doing the communicating can entirely know, and if they are very caught up in it, or don't even realize there's a problem because they don't know how things should be, then even they won't know until it finally clicks. Also I did have to deal with forced gratitude but that was a separate issue from my "words as puzzle" thing.

Also I have to say that using memorized phrases was both a stepping stone on the way to genuine communication and a horrible wall. A stepping stone because even before the purpose of communication clicked for good, gradually as time went on there was often more abd more communication mixed in with the babble. Wall because... well Donna Williams once said that learning to speak or type after a straightforward delay, is like slowly learning to ride a tame horse. And that trying to tame dysfunctional language is like trying to calm a bucking bronco while struggling to stay on its back. And that's true. When I went to try to connect words to my thoughts I was having to fight a raging current trying to sweep words back into "say anything anything at all as long as it sounds vaguely like what a person might say". And that problem is never truly and fully gone.