Live on tape

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Just got to wondering if THIS is connected.

I have extreme difficulty listening to books on tape. I can handle a phone conversation - though I don't love it. I can follow a live lecture. But read to me out of a book, and I lose track. I can hear the words, I can understand sentences as they go by, I can even react if something WRONG is said. But it just flies past - even if I don't fall asleep - ehich can happen - I come out unable to say what I just heard.

It may in part be because READING uses the voice differently from SPEAKING [I have researched this]. The rhythms change. But whatever the reason, I can't do it.

I can relate to this. I have difficulty following something that is spoken.

It is a strange case because you said you can listen to lectures and have phone conversations just fine... I do not know why this would be.
I know I don't like when people read out loud because, usually, when I read I have to read the same sentence multiple times before it clicks in my head, unlike a lecture. When someone is reading straight from a book, you can't say "wait wait, read that sentence five more times, until I get it" like when I read to myself. Strange.

I can't follow a live lecture, or any kind of talking very well, and have a lot of blank-outs, unless I happen to be very curious about the subject matter. Even stuff I think I should listen carefully to, if I'm not emotionally interested, it's unlikely to go in. With recorded or written stuff I can re-play or re-read it over and over till I get it, though sometimes not even that does a lot of good. In those cases I then try to find out why it's not going in - sometimes it's just that my mood is wrong, other times it's because the style of the words isn't clear to me....I don't mind it being "dry," but some communications use too many obscure words and they skirt over concepts that could be better defined. Also a lot of stuff seems done in a very "author-friendly" way (rather than a "user-friendly" way), which leaves the recipient with a lot of work to do, getting used to a lot of new terms and concepts, at a point where there's no way of knowing whether the investment is going to pay off - in other words the recipient is forced either to climb into the head of the author, or to simply abandon it.

When I talk to somebody, I know very well that they won't be likely to follow it unless I tailor what I say to where they're at. I don't do very well at that, presumably because of AS, but there's a lot of (presumably) non-AS material out there that doesn't follow that simple truth. For authors capable of social imagination, this would seem to be a grievous fault, yet there isn't a lot of protest about it.

I guess it depends with me. My trouble with reading is I see and process more than the word or sentence I'm reading and it just becomes a big jumble. It's funny, before I read this post I was thinking I should do what someone else suggested once on another thread and have a blank sheet of paper over the words with a space cut out just to reveal one sentence at a time. Listening is fine as long as I don't have to remember it.

Here is where I get to lecture. Hee hee. Special interest linguistics.

It is a matter of how the information comes. Material that is WRITTEN is structured so that if something does not compute you can go back and reread. It uses a more logical phrasing and punctuation to make up for the absence of voice control and facial expression. When I listen to recorded material, ToughDiamond, I am just about never in charge of the play button, and I get lost.

Material SPOKEN - not read from the written version - includes cues optimized for speech. And on the phone I CAN at least ask a question. I can lose track there too, but it is easier to get it.

It has been shown - if you write down what someone actually says - transcription of a conversation, or script for a play - it makes for very hard reading. Speaking the words from written material adds a handicap just as much.

Not sure what you mean there - if you mean somebody else won't let you touch the buttons, then maybe you need to wrest control from them. If you mean you can access the buttons but they don't help, then the nearest thing I've noticed in this vein is that tape recordings are linear, while written stuff is usually kind of 2-dimensional which often makes it easier to zip around the sheet and find things. The tape is a double-edged sword - it hides everything but the little piece of info that happens to be playing at the time, which can be a good way of helping to focus on the stuff sentence by sentence, but it also makes it harder to look back at what was said before, which can be important if your short-term memory is as unreliable as mine is.