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7:18pm March 4, 2012

➸ codeman38's tumblings: Language comprehension and production (an addendum to that previous post)

codeman38:

Was originally going to add this as just an edit to it, but I realized that it was significant enough to warrant a post of its own.

I very much associated with this in Amanda (youneedacat)’s post about language skills:

My language comprehension, as opposed to (superficial) expression, ranged…

That basic pattern is sometimes true for me. It depends not only on processing speech versus writing, but also on how well I am processing vision versus sound. My visual processing is pretty bad most of the time. Even so, writing can be easier simply because it sticks around so I can read it over and over. Speech doesn’t allow for that.  But there’s still times that I process vision so badly that I end up either not using my computer or turning on a screenreader. 

However there’s still something a little different between what I just described and what I usually call language comprehension.  Because everything I just described is more like how language is taken in through different senses.  And when I say that at some particular moment that I had really terrible language comprehension, I mean all language. I mean the means to understand that language even exists and what to do with it has gone away.  I mean that written language is just squiggles and spoken language is just sounds even if I can see and hear and even repeat it absolutely perfectly.  It’s a completely different experience than having trouble making out speech or writing, but trying to anyway because you know perfectly well that there’s language you’re supposed to be looking out for.

My most precarious skill is language comprehension too, but I mean the kind that applies to language in general. And it’s not just there or not there, there’s a bunch of stages in between.  In general if I’m not actually putting forth the effort, language comprehension is gone.  But it also easily drops away in ways where even effort gets me nowhere.  It often goes along with a general difficulty with ideas of any kind, not just words. 

And there are other abilities that I think I developed due to the lack or precariousness of all sorts of “basic” cognitive skills, that kick in when all that is gone, but also generally exist even when it’s there.  But that’s a topic for a completely different post. 

I find often that the lack of (general) understanding of language, and trouble with ideas, are two of the things that actually make me identify well with another autistic person. And that goes for whether they’ve managed to get to (real or fake) language production or not. 

And yet virtually nobody uses these things to distinguish between different kinds of autistic people. And when they do, they often get it wrong. Either by assuming that speaking superficially well has to mean good comprehension, or assuming that speaking poorly has to mean bad comprehension.

And yet this seems really important due to some things that I’ve both noticed on a personal level by observing people, and seen the bare beginnings of in actual research.  And that is that autistic people with poor language comprehension are often better at things that stereotypes say that autistic people can’t do.  Because most of the stereotypes are based on people with enough true language to describe how things are for them.  (Or people who had to turn on language to be tested and had to therefore turn off skills that depend more on lack of language.)

Like one of them is that, just as the stereotype says autistic people can process someone’s words but not tone, a lot of us process tone without words. And we tend to grasp more about nonverbal communication in general, and may even use that to help us pass for understanding things.  But the parts of nonverbal communication we grasp are sometimes so different than what nonautistic people grasp that they may not be able to test us for it properly. Especially the tests that use models and actors instead of the real thing.  I’ve actually described to researchers one way to test for it that requires no language use at all, but we’ll see if they use that.

There also tend to be ways of comprehending the world that don’t involve ideas or words or anything of the sort, but that’s too hard to explain in words.