What 'other' autism spectrum disorder do you have?

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I don't think that the extreme popularity of the stereotype is correct but that the seemingly overly common pedantry of autistic people is in part a misconception that stems from the autistic tendency to see details first and from the reliance on precise, explicit (not imprecise/generalised, implicit/between-the-lines) instructions and explanations.

Some autistic people strike me as truly somewhat pedantic because they desire precision about some things in which they don't depend on it (and hey, why not), but I also noticed that normal autistic behaviours of pedantic and not-so-pedantic people sometimes get labelled as pedantic when there's more to them than that.

An example I can think of is when a teacher during day care instructs a group of students that includes autistic children to "put the shoes away, please". If anything about why to put which shoes away to where and how to put them away is unclear to an autistic child in that group, they tend to get confused (and more often than not fail to imitate the others to cope with the confusion about the instructions) and the more verbal of them usually ask the teacher or another adult for clarification.

And a lot of teachers think that makes these children noisy and overly pedantic because they don't (intuitively) understand that such questions often are anything but pointless/unnecessary but that their instructions rely too much on implicit situational information exchange that's lost on the autistic student due to the nature of their AS/autism with an okay level of functional speech.

Yep, I have formal and pedantic speech.

I have autism. HFA. I wish there was an option for autism on that part of our profiles.

Last edited by Atomsk on 31 Jul 2012, 5:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I used to try to make my speech as formal as possible, but I am not quite as formal as that.

I recall on another forum an aspie called me pedantic when I told him his opinion was factually incorrect and empirically unsupportable.

I have High Functioning Autism.

The options for our Profiles have been the same since I joined here in 2005.

In Chinese, autism is called "Self Closed Syndrome", and ADHD is called "Moves A Lot Syndrome". Asperger's is a direct phoneticking of Asperger's + Syndrome.

I've also noticed this. Spontaneous speech is probably has to do with reading body language and theory of mind, plus you have to be interested in things what NTs are.


Sometimes I feel I don't find the right word or expression I'd like to use, even when I use my native language. It can be rather annoying, especially when I see other people who presumably studied much less in their life (both school and language) speaking without effort and producing complex verbal constructs at ease, always appearing to know what to say and always getting across their point.


I guess I might have had something similar up to my teenage years. I see how it might feel from the inside. For me it was like my mind stuck at a point with the phrase, like in the example the "cupboard", while at the same time my visual memory recalled and stuck with the image of the "table". No crosscheck had happened, as I was already bent on executing the task as soon as possible, to satisfy the request the best I could.


My guess: verbal ("apple") => visual image (picture) => abstract (mental image or "feeling" of a "nectarin", after a small glitch happened when making this conversion) => visual image (another) [=> verbal ("nectarin")]

So, after analyzing a little this thought process above, I suspect that the issue may not be limited only to language, but it could affect other departments of thinking, too. In other words, it may have a broader cause.


I guess it is more or less so with most people on the spectrum, even those who consider themselves hyperlexic often have difficulties with following IRL situations and/or TV shows and movies, which involve real-time processing of visual information and speech.

As for me, I rarely watch TV by now. I used to do more, but I simply find modern-style sped-up cinematography and the excessive use of bombastic visual effects tiresome and often outright irritating, not to mention I can't suffer the flood of commercials. Aside from these, I rarely find interesting stuff on TV. Surfing on the internet, reading a book, or listening to music has much greater inner value for me. So, I'm not at all surprised that I can't follow the stories, story-lines, conversations, plots, etc. that "normal" people can seemingly effortlessly. I think it applies to many on the spectrum.


Maybe directly asking the opinion of those people could help (in person or by phone)?


I'm also much better if I'm given enough (and usually a lot of) time to write out my thoughts.

As for the length, no problem here, I'm prepared for that. It's insightful, thank you for sharing.

My personal opinion is that your problem with speech may warrant a diagnosis, (and it appears you are more affected by it than me), so seeking professional help is recommended, imho.

That's not quite it - but it's difficult to put in words. I tried to anyway because I figured putting it in words might help if I end up having to explain it to someone else. I think I managed to sketch it down pretty accurately:

Someone says or writes to me: "Should I buy apples?" (I hear or read "apple"; I definitely have read or heard it right because I can say it out loud/repeat it or even spell it)

=> no visual
=> semi-aware completely non-verbal mental light-speed process that goes sort of "what's 'apple' again? I know it's a fruit-word. which fruit?"
=> visual of a (fruit) market, visual of a nectarine, visual of cherries, visual of an apple...
=> if I don't feel like wasting any more time, I randomly and impulsively settle on the visual of a nectarine (not remembering that it is called a nectarine) because I feel that it's right

I usually come up with apples = apples eventually.

Come to think of it, there may be a "pattern" with these single words that I "forget". There are words I never "forget" and words that I feel no different about than how I feel about foreign language vocabulary which is why I don't understand what they refer to in time or which is why I need to look them up first to be sure about what they mean.

At "cupboard" I go like: okay, what's a cupboard (in German) again? I would call everything from a cupboard to a shelf a "Schrank" before I was age 11-12 or so and without thinking about the words, I still feel as confused as back then though I should know all those words intuitively by now. Some words I figure out in seconds up to less than a minute (such as fruits), but I'd have to look up the difference between cabinets, cupboards... and the other thingies that go by other names.

There are words like that in about every category that I can think of: fruits, vegetables, diary products, clothes, wood-like furniture, sit-on furniture, animals but at the same time, I'd never mess up about oranges, puddings, orcas or magazines because... I don't know why but an orange is always an orange while everything made out of milk besides cheese was - and still is - always "pudding" to me even when it's not pudding and everything covering the upper body is a "shirt".