Losing speech in adulthood.

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what exact;y does this mean? I was never non verbal as a child but I would go through periods of not speaking much. I didn't speak for about a week after something very devastating happened to me as a teen, but it wasn't as though I COULDN'T speak. I still go nonverbal sometimes as an adult but it's because I have no interest in speaking, it's kind of an all or nothing with me, but I see people talking about temporary loss of speech in adulthood here. Does this mean that you literally lose the ability to speak?

I go through periods, where it's very hard for me to speak, and I stutter, but I've never had non verbal periods, before.

It means that too little attention is paid to the issues of adults, and autistic development is too often tracked only by children. Many, many autistic adults lose speech some of the time, whether or not they had a speech delay. A fair-sized minority of autistic people have a movement disorder that can lead to permanent loss of speech (regardless of speech history or which spectrum diagnosis a person has) in adolescence or adulthood, although sometimes this takes the form of periodic loss of speech that just becomes more and more frequent until there's no communicative-type speech left at a certain point. (Which is what happened to me and a few other people I know.) There are a very large number of reasons why people have trouble with speech, from emotional, to cognitive, to motor, and each one of those reasons has a number of variants.

Happens to me on occasion, whenever I go into shutdown. Can last just a few minutes to maybe a day or two.

Selective mutism, too. Which can be nearly unrelated to autism (except, of course, that it's happening to the same person).

Or just plain stress. There probably isn't an Aspie alive who hasn't lost the ability to speak coherently under extreme stress.

I've only had speech stop working beyond all effort twice; both times were due to a large amount of sleep deprivation and stress. At lesser levels I can force it, but usually don't want to because it'll make overload/being-on-edge/discombobulation worse. Usually under stress or fatigue my speech just starts getting more and more inarticulate until it doesn't make a lot of sense (pieces of 'scripts' badly stitched together). But it totally cutting out isn't a major problem in my case.

You could always try staying up for 5 or 6 days to see what happens (just kidding).

I read that an autistic guy who'd been assaulted and arrested was having speech problems his relatives hadn't seen before, when they saw him in jail. So yeah, somebody ought to be studying that.