Autism and Pragmatics

A lot is being said about the changes to the diagnostic criteria for autism. One of the clues that doctors are looking for is a deficit in pragmatics. It has long been said about autistic people that we have difficulty with pragmatics and understanding the subtle, the unspoken, and the inferred. Rather than improve the communication techniques of the general population - please say what you mean and mean what you say - the focus turns to autistic people. Why can’t we decipher what isn’t quite being said?

Take this old article from Notre Dame.

“When children with autism speak they sound different from most people. Their speech usually follows one of several characteristic patterns: Some talk in a flat, toneless voice, others in an exaggerated, hyper way that doesn’t match the subject matter. Still others may sound robotic; their speech doesn’t flow but comes in clipped bursts.

A recent study of nearly 100 children with autism and 100 typically developing peers conducted by Joshua Diehl, Notre Dame assistant professor of psychology, and colleagues at Yale and Harvard universities suggests the speech difficulty may be because children with autism understand meaning differently as it’s communicated through tone of voice, not because they have trouble reproducing the speech patterns, as has been thought.

“It isn’t a hearing issue,” Diehl says. “It’s not that they have trouble producing changes in tone of voice. It’s that they have problems understanding it and how it’s meaningfully used.”

It’s an interesting premise … and it’s completely wrong. Here’s an alternative explanation from a non-verbal autistic researcher … me.

My problems with pragmatics and affect don’t stem from a speech difficulty per se. They stem from the fact that I am forced to work in a language that is not native to me. Consider how you sound when speaking a foreign language. How well do you detect tonal shifts and inferred meaning in the foreign language? How long will it take for you to be proficient in this foreign language, proficient enough to engage in sophisticated pragmatics? Studies show that it can take between 4-7 years of dedicated study and practice. Why then does society expect autistic people to simply produce foreign language pragmatics without the requisite practice?

Society expects proficient pragmatics from non-verbal populations because they don’t understand what it means to be non-verbal. No, non-verbal and non-vocal are not the same. Non-verbal is a way of experiencing the world. It’s how our brains process the world and describe it to ourselves. Our semiotics are multidimensional and not rooted in the relationship to the correspondence of letters and their associated sounds.

Very few people are working on “the problem” in this way. The majority of researchers declare the autistic system to be disordered, then work to restore it to a proper order. They don’t consider for a minute that our system is different, foreign. They don’t consider that English, for me, will always be a foreign language. My brain does not process the world in English. It doesn’t process the world in any verbal language. It processes the world utilising multidimensional semiotics. It then must take this amazingly rich and dense material and translate it into a two dimensional space - content and tone - using a language that may not be fit for the purpose of the translation.

Let’s examine how this might work. Please tell me the meaning of the English word “dude.” Do it now. Get it correct, now. If you get it wrong, you will not get a reward, you will likely be fired from your job, and lose your health care and housing. Plus, if you can’t get it immediately correct, to my satisfaction and to standards which I will not share with you, I will ridicule you endlessly in public. I may even create scripted TV shows and movies that illustrate to the world how incompetent you are. After all, you should be able to define and describe “dude” on demand. It should be perfect …

How did that feel? It hurt to type it out. But, this is how the system works. Do this arbitrary thing to our satisfaction, that is rather unimportant, or you will lose everything and thus be relegated to a life of seclusion and despair. If you have the privilege, you may be able to afford intensive behavioural therapies to help you pass for neurotypical … but you get one chance. Fail once and we’ll know who you are.

Don’t worry, folx. Help is on the way. More information on that in a future post.