anbuend wrote:
I also think I picked a lot of it up during the time when words made zero sense to me. I relied hugely on patterns of movement and tonal and other auditory patterns in people's voices. There is some evidence that autistics with receptive language delays are better at this than autistics who understand language better. That has been a big error in some studies, they like using the autistic people who can use words, and most autistic people who can use words don't have these receptive language problems. For many autistics we can do either words or body language but not both at once and many autistics end up using words all the time and body language never, and that becomes the stereotype.
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Fascinating! My daughter was fairly significantly language delayed. She has language now, but it took awhile and is still somewhat idiosyncratic (invented words, backwards pronouns). But she doesn't seem to have the problems reading body language that the doctors led me to expect. She has no idea what she's supposed to do in social situations and avoids them, but it's not because she has no idea if somebody is happy, angry, sad, confused etc. She reads those well enough. She just doesn't know the social protocol involved and that makes her very nervous. She can certainly read me well enough. When she was less language-confident, her teachers had those PECS drawings of people emoting and she would point to one to show how she was feeling. Then when she talked more and became a schoolkid, she would come home from school and describe a fellow student's face and their body labguage and I would tell her the expected social response. (Still do. She's still a schoolkid.) The problem was never body language. It has always been what to
do in response to the body language.
I figured this was just because nobody ticks off all the autism-trait boxes. But I never stopped to consider
why she was better at reading body language than the doctors and books would have me believe. Before she talked (or talked in more than single words), she stared intensly at people all the time. She wasn't one of those kids that stared at ceiling fans or spinning wheels. She stared at people with such an intense stare and such intense eye contact that she didn't get an autism diagnosis for a while because they were looking for zero eye contact and eyes directed at the spinning fans. I don't know why I never connected her good ability at seeing body language with her long time spent staring at people but not talking. But I didn't. Now that you connect it, it does make perfect sense!
14 Apr 2010, 6:18 pm
