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Sep6
Autism and Me: Difficulties with the Spoken Word
11 CommentsI’ve mentioned in other posts that I see words spelled out in my mind when I’m thinking, talking, or listening. The Asperger’s specialist who diagnosed me said that seeing these word pictures must be very distracting to me. I had never considered the question before. I now believe that this way of thinking is part of the reason that I have a hard time keeping track of a lecture or conversation. I’m seeing the visuals while trying to listen.
College Lectures
In college, I learned that if I weren’t taking notes, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on an hour-long lecture. Without a pencil and a piece of paper, I’d follow the lecture to a certain point, and then suddenly, it would seem as though the lecturer had taken a huge logical leap. For the life of me, I could not figure out how he or she had gotten there. I’d go back in my mind, trying to parse the beginning of the lecture, and before I knew it, we were in the middle. By the time the lecture was over, I had long since given up.My sense is that I became so interested in the literal appearance of the words in my mind that I lost track of what the lecturer was about to say next. After a great deal of frustration, I learned that the best way around the difficulty was to take furious, copious notes. It was the only way I could remain present to what was being said. Later on, I could read my notes and put the logic together myself.
Conversations with Others
Every Friday morning, I used to volunteer at our local public library. Everyone was very friendly, the place was very quiet, and my job involved packing up books for interlibrary loans. One morning last winter, when I was still grappling with the issue of whether I was autistic, I had an opportunity to observe what happens to me when I don’t have recourse to the written word.The first ten minutes after my arrival at the library were fine. I made eye contact, I smiled, and I was able to stay in the flow of the conversation. One woman complimented me on my scarf and asked whether I had knitted it myself. When I answered in the affirmative, another person said that I should talk with the lady on the second floor who was organizing a knitting circle. One of my co-workers took me up to meet her, where I gave her my contact information.
As I came down the stairs, I congratulated myself on my social skills, and I wondered why in the world I thought I was autistic. I took up my post, packaged the books, and talked to people on the staff when I needed help.
By the time I left two hours later, I was completely disoriented and overwhelmed. I felt out of sync in every conversation. It was as though each interaction were a dance to which I had never learned the steps. With every word coming out of my mouth, I knew that I was going on far too long and talking about all the wrong things, but my panic over feeling overwhelmed only made me talk more.
To make matters worse, I couldn’t remember anything that anyone had told me. Was the spinning class up the road or was that the knitting class? And there was something about a drop spindle in there, wasn’t there? I felt as though I were behind a glass, listening to people speak, but unable to remember the content of their words or come up with an appropriate response.
At that point, I was finally convinced that I have a problem processing spoken language. I couldn’t keep up with all the words coming into my brain, and I couldn’t figure out how to slow down the words coming out my mouth. Besides, if I just kept talking, surely someday, someone would understand what I was trying to say.
Learning New Languages
I love foreign languages and have studied French, Spanish, Latin, and Hebrew. I can read and write a foreign language fairly easily, but when it comes to speaking, I have difficulty arriving at fluency. I have a very hard time understanding a foreign language when it’s spoken, and I find it difficult to answer spoken questions in any kind of reasonable time frame. Until I was diagnosed with autism, I could never understand why. Now that I realize that I can’t converse very fluently in English, my difficulties with foreign languages are no longer a surprise to me.As I get ready for my ASL class, I’m heartened by the knowledge that ASL is a visual language. Lou Fant, one of the founders of the National Theater for the Deaf, wrote the following about ASL: “The uniqueness of ASL lies in the simple fact that it is based upon light waves rather than sound waves.” I’m an intensely visual person. I can focus, attend to, and organize what my eyes can see far better than I can focus, attend to, and organize what my ears can hear. ASL may very well be the language in which I finally arrive at fluency.
© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
11 Responses to “Autism and Me: Difficulties with the Spoken Word”
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I have a similar problem. If it is a subject I am passionate about, I tend to not want to take notes, which causes a problem if I have to take a test on it. I usually retain a near perfect understanding but absolutely no facts. I also tend to lose any terminology that I am not already familiar with. If it is a subject which is always difficult for me, or one I’m not really interested in, I must take notes. It is always better for me if the person giving the lecture or presentation also shows their notes. Outline form on a blackboard or whiteboard is best. I have trouble reading overheads or power point. If they only speak, I quickly get lost, as my aural comprehension is very slow.
The problem with note taking for me, is that it goes against my grain to just jot information down. I want it in some sort of order. Once the logical order is messed up, I get so frazzled I often give up trying to take notes.Conversations with others are a nightmare for me. Apparently I don’t hear everythng people say. I latch on to one stream and miss additional information. Forget remembering “asides”. It doesn’t happen. I also cannot connect a bit of information from one topic and remember it for another, even if it applies to both. If I remember it, it is only in the context that it was presented in.
I might be totally present and responsive and witty and with it in a conversation and not be able to recall much of anything afterwards. It is very distressing and pretty embarrassing when I have to ask someone to tell me again later.
Speaking seems to get worse with time or maybe I am just kidding myself. I’ve always been told I speak too quietly. I speak too fast and recently I’ve noticed I stumble over words, transpose words and phrases and repeat myself many times. I think the repeating is because I can’t figure out how to conclude, so I get caught in this loop of talking that I don’t know how to get out of. LOL Usually the only way I can get out is to walk away midstream.
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DonkeyBuster September 6th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Interesting. =0)
I have a mental ‘tape’ of what was said that plays a split second after the actual speech… that is what I refer to, especially when I’m slightly distracted when someone speaks to me, as when I’m reading or at the computer or I get distracted by some detail for a moment. It works pretty well as long as it’s one person (so lectures are no problem… or no bigger for me than for any other bored out her gourd student LOL), but conversing with two people… uh, that quickly works up to input clutter, very difficult to respond timely or appropriately. The more people talking, the harder I have to work listening to the tape, the further behind I get and sure enough… I’ve lost the flow, I’m feeling weird, out of place, all the demons start making themselves felt, time to go.
I’m so tired of going to potlucks, etc. and not being able to join conversations because of that ‘oddness’ feeling. It’s a hard one to let pass unaccompanied, as they say. Stepping back, looking at things with ‘new eyes’, better informed about the whole dynamic of the situation, maybe there are options I’ve not noticed…
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I have nearly identical problems except I don’t get visuals of words – for me it’s a straightforward attentional problem. My brain skips little bits of lectures, like maybe skipping one groove of a record, but once I’m lost, there’s no getting back. I got through college and grad school relying almost entirely on written material, and taking constant notes when I couldn’t.
The transition to work…well, most things are verbal and most important things are said once…and people at my first post-grad-school workplace have told me “the only way you can learn is by sitting in meetings for years”, which was even used by one co-worker as an excuse for refusing to give me copies of existing written material. I’m trying to get out of there.
I can read, write, and speak Spanish pretty well, and I really like languages, but I can’t understand what people say to me. I went home from an undergrad exchange student program partly because I could communicate to others, but I couldn’t communicate with others, if that makes sense. I think part of the problem was also that I could take on the accent well and it made me sound like I was more competent than I really was.
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I was/am a frantic note taker too. Don’t attend many lectures or talks these days, and when I do, I have a hard time retaining the info, worse than when I was younger. I’m not sure if I think in word pictures though. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by all the AS info, it’s a bit like when I go to the doctor and say something hurts, and he asks me to describe the pain. I don’t know, it just hurts and I want him to make it stop, is that too much to ask??!! (A bit humiliating too, when I’m known as a life-long word geek). I also know that when I am reading or researching, and I want to go back to something, I kind of go by its location on the page (e.g. I know it was on a right-hand page, about half way down, and at the end of a long/short paragraph etc).
I never went on any student exchange program, just as well as I would have probably gotten sent home (or begged to go home, like the poster above). My aunt and I once ran into a gaggle of French students in the big city and she pushed me towards them with a cheery “elle parle francais!” To say I spazzed out would be putting it politely. Still makes me cringe decades later. I seem to remember scaring the heck out of a German exchange student when I asked him about the french-looking accents on words in a german poem (wot, no umlauts? turned out to be some archaic dialect thing), his reaction may have been the unconscious yikes-it’s-an-aspie shudder; another exchange student despised me heartily and made her feelings quote clear, even though other students would summon me to explain weird local customs (like staying in the classroom for attendance) to her and i did my best to be friendly and welcoming and blah blah blah. -
John Dale Lyons September 7th, 2009 at 10:25 am
Hi Rachel. It’s nice to be back after being away for so long. Love to you & the AJ community.
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Sharon Howarth September 8th, 2009 at 2:09 am
Rachel,
I am printing (and emailing this to my son, 15, Asperger’s individual) who processes very much like you describe. I hope to provide your 9/6/09 blog post for his high-school teachers to better understand what he has been trying to describe as his learning difficulties.
He says he sees ‘closed caption’ type messages or ‘ticker-tape’ of the words and so he is not ‘hearing’ the words, he is ‘reading’ them as they are produced visually in his mind’s eye.
I was just directed to this wonderful resource of yours…I am AS, husband and three kids AS, so we will learn and appreciate much from you.
Thanks so much (from my heart) for your efforts here. You are an example of why I like to spell autism differently– Awe-tism
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Hi Sharon,
This is the first time I’ve heard anyone else describe thinking in “word pictures.” How amazing!
Glad you’re finding my blog so helpful. Welcome!
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Hi Eileen,
I repeat myself too, for partly the same reason: I’m just not sure how to finish a conversation, so I just keep talking, hoping that I’ll somehow find the graceful ending. Also, being blind to those oft-talked-about-but-never-seen nonverbal cues, I’ll repeat myself in the hope that someone will verbalize that they’ve understood what I mean. Once I get confirmation, I can move on like the next person. Really.
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I noticed I repeat stuff too. Then I go away and wonder why didn;t I shut up, the NTs will hate me! [I think I need to get over that].
I started to stumble over words too, I remember it starting when I was still in college. It seems to be much worse now. At one time i wanted to get into public speaking, because the idea of speaking in front of a bunch of people doesn’t scare me, but the stumbling thing really puts a spanner in the works. And my voice is too quiet too, if there’s no mic forget it. I have shelved those ambitions now.
Reading these comments, I;m amazed yet again to find others with the same issues. I feel a teeny tiny bit less alone in my “weirdness” -
Hi, Rachel. I’ve just found your blog because I’m doing some reading about Asperger’s. I’m loving it; thanks!
I’m NT – and far more verbal than visual – but related immediately to what you were saying about ‘word pictures’. Speech runs like a printed tickertape through my mind, and so does everything I’m about to say. It only takes a microsecond, but people do register the delay.
As this isn’t the sort of thing people normally think to discuss, I have no idea how usual this is. I know that one of my friends has a ‘tickertape’ like mine. Same as you, we were both very early readers.
In my recent readings, I think I’ve got a pretty clear idea about what the real differences between Aspies & the rest of us are … it bothers me, though, that a lot of ordinary human characteristics are often ascribed to autism by both “sides”.
For another example, most people have trouble with reverse directions! Plus, I don’t know anyone who’s never become hopelessly lost in a familiar district. We all have ‘absences’, maybe some more than others – but is a universal experience
You have plenty of unique traits already, Rachel, try to avoid seeing handicaps where there are none …
Hope the ASL classes went well; it sounds like a superb idea for you.
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Taylor Selseth October 27th, 2009 at 9:17 am
I often need a note-taker because I simply cannot pay attention to the lecture (especially when there is overhead projector slides with it) and take notes at the same time.
I’m been learning Spanish lately and trying to understand the spoken language is a pain. Is it just me or do Spanish speakers talk faster than English speakers?
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