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7:32pm March 4, 2012

➸ "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": Language skills that develop when others are missing

kazaera:

youneedacat:

I think I still retain one of the skills I used the most often to handle language growing up. My language comprehension, as opposed to (superficial) expression, ranged from “meh” to nonexistent. And so did the ties between my superficial level of expression, and what I was actually thinking. I…

Oh, wow. I identify with a surprising amount of this, considering I’m… er… relatively highly verbal.

I say “relatively” because I’ve noticed that I actually often say things without knowing what they are. If I am under stress, my processing time for understanding speech, understanding the concepts implied, working out a response and translating that response into words grows (I call it “processing lag”) and some bits may fritz out entirely (e.g. my auditory processing often goes.) And at some point, I developed an automatic response system that cuts in when the pause is too long. And I feel very awkward and sometimes have trouble believing it myself because it’s marvelously sophisticated! and often goes totally unnoticed even by me! but then sometimes I’ll realise I’ve said the opposite of what I was thinking or I’ve said something that doesn’t actually logically connect with the previous conversation or wtfever, and I will go “…why did I say that?” and the answer will be “well, I was taking too long actually understanding what had been said, so in order for there not to be a big pause I opened my mouth and words came out.” In the extreme case, I have had a conversation where I didn’t know what either of us was saying. And many, many more times I think I don’t realise I’ve done it at all.

The more I think about my actual verbal skills, the more I think I have a surprising amount of problems with certain things for someone who is highly verbal and, from the outside looking in, doesn’t appear to have any verbal difficulties whatsoever. Well, not counting the speech disorder, which affects an entirely different stage of the process and may be totally unrelated to spectrum.

And I am nodding so hard about the SJ buzzword stuff. I actually become uncomfortable about this sometimes, because some of the SJ language stuff pings me for ingroup/outgroup markers, and I trust my intuition on that front because it’s very finely honed but it upsets me because this is *meant* to be about justice and equality, not cliquishness - isn’t it?

Also, the not knowing who was forbidding it - I am kind of angry at my brain now, because what is so wrong with leaving pauses in speech that I have to reflexively fill them with a random assortment of phrases and words that seem right for the situation? It’s similar to how I cannot, cannot, cannot make myself ask anyone to repeat themselves more than twice to three times maximum, and if I still haven’t understood it then I have to pretend I did.

I used to appear highly verbal myself – except that virtually all my speech was that mechanical filling in stuff. Same with writing. That’s exactly the kind of skills I used this stuff for.