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2:56pm September 20, 2014
turbulentbeauty asked: Hi, sorry this is a bit silly, but you mention your dad said "see the moon" as a baby. Why is that typical of autism? Apparently my first word was "hi" but around 18 months I developed extensive vocabulary and was obsessed with the moon! I asked "where did the moon go?" every day pretty much. If other autistic people are obsessed with the moon as kids that would be cool, but I feel like maybe that's not what you meant. haha.

officialjasminec:

withasmoothroundstone:

My brother apparently asked a lot of questions about the moon at an early age, like “If the moon is orbiting the earth, what keeps it from falling down and hitting the ground?”  At the age of like… two or three.  He is autistic.

But the autistic thing about my dad’s words wasn’t exactly the moon part.  It’s a couple of things.  One, most babies learn to talk by babbling and then saying things like “mama” and “dada” as their first words — social things, things related to people.  Even many autistic people start out with words like that.

But autistic people often have a delay in speech, followed by suddenly speaking in complete sentences.  Or some start speaking in complete sentences even with no speech delay or regression.  This can be from echolalia or it can be from just skipping over all the preliminary stages of speech (or at least some of them) and landing at complete sentences without doing single words or phrases first.

So “See the moon” as your first words is very autistic because it’s not socially oriented words (like “mommy” and “daddy”), and because it’s starting in complete sentences while skipping over several developmental stages involving speech.  Not all autistic things involve being behind, some of them can involve being ahead, or skipping developmental phases altogether, or going through the phases in an unusual order.  My brother and I both went through a lot of developmental phases in the “wrong order” or in a very delayed way.  My father probably did too but I don’t know much about his early development and his parents are dead so they can’t tell us any more.

Okay, so first off, I have Asperger’s and autism is one of my special interests - so much that I’m a psychology major and I’m actually getting my Master’s in Autism Spectrum Disorders. So I’ve spent hours researching autism and other psychological/psychiatric disorders as well.

Now onto my reply:

Though I agree that many autistic individuals tend to have speech and language issues, it’s unrealistic to say that not having a socially oriented first word is “very autistic”. There is no research to back up that claim. Now skipping certain parts of speech development due to a speech delay does seem to be common for some autistic individuals (though it seems to be more common in Aspergers), but even so, there aren’t enough people who’ve done it to consider it “typical”. (Because this isn’t apparent in all individuals, the lower functioning, or the individuals who don’t speak at all. It’s different if you want to say it seems to be typical of HIGH FUNCTIONING individuals, but even so, saying something is “typical” of autism is basically perpetuating a stereotype, because you’re telling anyone who reads this that they can identify an autistic individual solely by the speech & language delays that you’ve mentioned, which is completely and utterly untrue. “Common” would likely be a better word choice, by the way.) Some things that I would consider typical of autism are having sensory issues (SPD) and/or extremely restrictive eating patterns, because I’ve yet to see or hear of an autistic person that doesn’t have one (or both) of those issues. Some have reported that a large number of Aspies become hyperlexic; what you’re describing basically goes along with that, because hyperlexic individuals often have a hard time understanding speech. It also explains why skipping parts of speech development seems to be more common in Aspies (high functioning individuals).

Not only that, but having a language delay really isn’t enough to go off of to predict an ASD. Also, there’s more to a child skipping certain developmental speech stages than that and it automatically meaning autism. (More research needs to be done on that before you claim such a thing. Maybe you didn’t mean to imply such a thing, but you did by claiming it’s “very autistic”.) For instance, if a child is only speaking a few words at ages 2-3, but really starts speaking around 4-5, you wouldn’t expect the child to “babble”. Babies babble as a way to experiment with sounds because they don’t yet have the ability to produce comprehensible words. It’s a normal developmental process, but of course, it’s not necessary, as proven by many people who’ve had speech delays and went on to form sentences without ever babbling. From what I’ve observed and researched, basically, the later a child starts speaking, the more likely they are to skip certain stages of speech development. And it makes sense when you think about it. Even if the child isn’t speaking, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not processing or hearing what’s being said. I believe this is the cause of some autistic individuals skipping certain developmental stages.

One parent at WrongPlanet theorized that her child (who has Aspergers) might not have spoken on time because of his perfectionistic ways. Another person (who also has Aspergers) basically felt the same way because they said:

“First spoke at age two, which is somewhat late statistically, but not radically so.
Spoke immediately in complete sentences, which would indicate that I’d been listening and understanding for quite some time, but didn’t start using language until I was confident that I knew how it was supposed to work.” - Willard, WrongPlanet.net

Thus proving my theory that this whole thing is much more complicated than you’re making it out to be. My other theory is also that this has nothing to do with autism, considering that kids who aren’t on the spectrum can and have done this before as well. Like I said, more research (actual studies) will need to be done on this before such claims can be made and be accurate.

So you’re basically forgetting that non-autistic kids can do this as well. There are many disorders that can lead to a speech delay and a child ending up skipping parts of “normal” language development. I have a brother who’s not on the spectrum and he basically did this. By the time he was speaking in complete sentences, he also stuttered. (I was speaking in small phrases at 9 months old.) Yet both of us are gifted (and were placed in the gifted program after gifted/IQ testing) and he never had anymore issues like that and wasn’t diagnosed with any language delay or disorder. That’s why I’m not convinced this has anything to do with being on the spectrum; perhaps it’s more of an auditory processing (APD) issue or something different altogether, because my brother was also terribly shy as a child. He’s a social butterfly (a total extravert) now though.

I answered an ask.

I answered an ask because I thought it was a really good productive thing to do with my time.

I thought it was a really good productive thing to do with my time, because I haven’t been very productive lately.  My father is dying of cancer, my mother is severely ill with myasthenia gravis, my grandmother is slowing down and developing stomach symptoms, and my ‘second mother’ just got diagnosed with endometrial cancer.  I’m under a lot of stress and I thought answering three of my asks might take my mind off things.

I did not think I was going to run straight into language dickery.

http://youneedacat.tumblr.com/post/96226031970/so-those-three-posts-are-very-important-to

If you really want to understand why I’m completely upset by this, read the three links given in the above link. 

I’m not going to engage in further conversation about the subject matter.  If you are going to pick nits about whether I said “common” or “typical”, then clearly we’re not going to be capable of communicating with each other, probably not even if we were both trying as hard as we could.  And all the word-juggling about outdated diagnostic categories doesn’t inspire my confidence that we even understand autism in anywhere near the same way.

FWIW, I’ve known hundreds of autistic people and I’ve read as much of the literature as I can get my hands on starting in the 1940s (when my father was born in 1941 to a rural farming family which is why he was not diagnosed, nobody in that time and place was diagnosed… but he would not have been diagnosed with Asperger’s, his language development was too unusual, and he would have fit right in with Kanner’s original patients, had he been in the demographic that got people seen by Kanner, which he was very much not) all the way up to the present.  I’ve devoured everything in my university library having to do with autism, including lots of old journal articles.  I’m not unfamiliar with autism or what it looks like and can look like.  In fact, I’m familiar enough with autism that I disregard categories like Asperger’s vs. Kanner’s or high functioning vs. low functioning because they don’t actually work for the level and kind of diversity there is among autistic people.

I’m also not diagnosed with Asperger’s myself (autistic disorder), although now that’s moot because it’s all autism spectrum disorder.  And I’ve never been officially called high functioning.  I have been officially called low functioning or severe a few times, but that’s a label I reject on principle.  (And that was back when I was far more verbal than I am now.)

I have a lot of language problems.  Those language problems are not always visible online, but they are real and they are severe.  I am not capable of holding discussions with people who tell me what I meant by things and then argue with their imaginary version of what I meant.  This makes any degree of communication impossible.  So I am giving up now.  All I wanted to do was fricking answer an ask.  I answered three asks — two really.  I hope the other one doesn’t have stuff like this tacked onto it, because this does not help my stress levels one bit.  And no, it’s not because you disagreed with me.  It’s because you decided you knew what I meant, made a point of insisting that certain words have to mean certain things, and then argued with me entirely on the basis of my language usage.  I can’t have conversations with people who do that.  They never end well.  I’m cutting this one off before it can even start, because I don’t feel like running around in circles in my head justifying what I said, to you.

All I can say is that I stand by what I said, or rather I stand by what I meant.  And what I meant is not what you’re responding to.  You’re responding to an imaginary ghost standing next to me, and you can’t see me at all, just the ghost.  I can’t have conversations with ghosts in them.  I’ve never, ever had a conversation with a ghost in it go well no matter what I tried.  I’ve tried begging, pleading, explaining over and over again.  Nothing works.  We probably have fundamentally incompatible communication styles.

Sorry if I wasn’t very nice about this.  My brain ran out of nice-in-response-to-language-dickery a few days ago when I found out my dad was getting sicker and the chemo wasn’t working.  I don’t really know what’s left.  Oh yes, the grumpy stick.  I am definitely, definitely the grumpy stick.

http://youneedacat.tumblr.com/post/95466466410/grumpy-stick

Maybe in some other time, in some other place, we could have bonded over knowing various things about autism and autistic people and stuff, and could have had a conversation about this that wouldn’t send my cortisol levels running off the rails.  But we don’t.  We can’t.  Because this happened instead.  And it’s already happened.  And I’ll be twitchy around you from now on.  So I can’t read any further.