...and I said 14 of them. Only 14 because I don't remember a gigantic jump forward in language at the age of 4 or 5 (edited to add: There was a major shift then, but not that, that I remember). The reason I posted it this way, was that I knew I had some of these traits, and that they made me different from many autistic people I knew, but I had no clue that all of these traits were said to be related to each other.
Specifically, the fact that I had serious trouble comprehending language while able to form echolalic language (as in, did not know what language was, or what it was for, at all, but could repeat words and other sounds, and could match a lot of language-patterns to each other before I got even an inkling of what words meant or that they in fact meant anything). That stuff has been... of the autobiographies I've read by autistic people, that is very rare in them, and when I talk to other autistic people online, most (outside of a small number) haven't experienced this (or not to any great degree, and this is including people who remain non-speaking and have always had a pretty high level of language comprehension), and many can't even comprehend it or even tell me it's not possible.
It turns out there's a category where it's more common. I knew I fit that category for other reasons, and that most other people I knew who fit that category did not experience what I did, or not to this degree. So I am curious about this, now.
And in my case, the language incomprehension means, spoken words as noise, written words as squiggles (but in my case, squiggles I could sometimes turn into noise, but without comprehension of either noise or squiggles). I don't mean (although I'm sure this encompasses that as well in less extreme versions, because it's sometimes like this later on, including now, although it's still often just noise and squiggles) words that are simply distorted in how they sound, or where part of them makes sense and part of them doesn't. I mean, no comprehension that words hold meaning, for a length of time long enough for me to figure out other systems of meaning that don't involve words or symbols at all.
It's also possible for a person to, even while understanding words or symbols, to be capable of operating outside of them. I just mean, for awhile I was incapable of operating inside of them in terms of thinking. (These days, there are times when I am incapable of operating inside of them, but there are also times when I am capable of doing so, it just makes my brain hurt to do it and it remains foreign to me. That is what I am like now.)
And, I basically developed language in a really weird way because I learned these rote echolalic things that I matched through patterns before even knowing what the stuff meant, and then gradually learned, this combination of meaning, several different purposes of communication, the ability to pattern-match "appropriate-sounding" sentences, speech itself, and a number of other components of communication, all at different rates, and often with if I got ahead in one of them it sacrificed the others for awhile and they would be held back again and have to start over or start from earlier, so even if I'd learned something by some point I had to relearn it a number of times. And I know very few other autistic people who did this (although I do know a few).
And then quite a few autistic people go "Huh? How does that even work?" when I describe that. Because even if they had trouble with spoken language, they often knew perfectly well what it was and what it was for, before they developed it. Or they developed several of those things before they developed the others, so they never had the weird back-and-forth effect I developed, nor the extreme mismatches between things that most people (including seemingly most autistic people) consider "all part of the same thing" (and are therefore either confused by me or even suspicious of me when I report what and how I did learn). But... this clumping of all these things together is exactly how I approached it all.
At any rate, I'm excited to learn that this category is actually used to describe so precisely the way I developed language, and am now curious how many other people experienced most of these (although that still leaves out the question how many experienced them as long as and to the degree that I did, since a person could answer yes to all this while still having from pretty early been perfectly aware what words were and how to get meaning out of them, but just had trouble doing so, so that for instance a sentence could sound like "I frendled some norts to the berndoor today" and a person might miss half the sentence but still get the basic point of it).
So... I'm pretty excited.
_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams
Last edited by anbuend on 11 Jan 2008, 11:14 am, edited 2 times in total.
11 Jan 2008, 10:45 am
