#language processing disorder

Case in point, today at work one ofbmy coworkers got all mad and offended because I was "rude and disrespectful" because in the morning, while thinking about the things I needed to do and thought of an important question before I could start my question to ask my mentor, asked the question and she was talking and thus I interrupted her. Yes, rude now that I KNOW she was talking and so I apologize, but I really hate the implied intent or lack of caring put with the "autistic interruption" shit

Ignoring social cues and rules aside, I *literally* didn't realize / process she was talking. Of course, I'm not deaf or HoH so I can't say that because "How could I not hear her? She was speaking loud enough to know" and there is a HUGE difference between *hearing* and *processing* and so when they always give the advise of be more considerate / think before you speak or tell you the social rule to not interript cause its rude, it doesn't help like at all

Cause yes, I KNOW that and I DO think before I speak. I just *literally* didnt process her speech as speech and it was filtered as white noise.

Its like going into a busy and loud club and saying "dont speak if the guy two tables down is talking"

It can be but it isn’t always.

There are degrees of language processing difficulties in autism and the same issues that cause someone to be fully nonverbal can be present in an autistic that is verbal to but to a lessor degree.

Communicating when you have difficulties with processing language or with the physical forming of words (apraxia) means that it can be very tiring to talk and to process speech.

It takes more energy and more concentration.

anything that makes you more tired or less able to concentrate can effect your ability or desire to speak.

You may not be able to speak for long before it tires you and you lose speech.

I know it’s not always connected to anxiety because it happens more when I am tired or can’t concentrate, not when anxious.

I can be non speaking and be extremely happy and content.

The processing language issue also effects my writing.

I assume that those this happens to will be people that are semi-verbal all the time. But I don’t know if that is correct.

After much digging I have realized that what I am experiencing is likely a whole Language Processing Disorder.

This on top of some beautiful discoveries the last couple of days like:

Expressing my needs makes me feel unsafe

Being misunderstood is a Trigger

Ask date: September 8th

This absolutely could be due to autism.  Autism affects language in huge ways.  Some people are so affected that they are not able to speak at all, or can speak very limitedly.  Others are able to speak but do it in an “abnormal” or unusual way (me).  Autism also affects listening, both with Auditory Processing Disorder (a deficiency in the ability to process sounds), and also deficiencies in observing social cues such as facial expressions, eye contact, and body language, all of which affects communication.

I tried really hard to find a good article about how autism affects language...and I was shocked that I couldn’t, because autism affecting language is one of the most difficult symptoms of autism (and one of the most prevalent).  The few articles I did find were very scientific, and boiled down to “We know that autism affects language.  We don’t know how or why, more studies need to be done.”

I did find an article about Language Processing Disorder that seemed to fit what you are describing to a T, but it didn’t mention autism other than to say LPD was different from autism, so I don’t know whether an autistic person can have LPD, or whether being autistic excludes you from having it.

I found ONE good article that listed the symptoms of autism language deficiencies, which was super useful.  This lists the ways in which autism can affect language.  It’s a really extensive, thorough list.

So I suppose you can compare those two, and see which one you relate to more, to help you figure out what’s going on for you.

But yes, autism absolutely affects language, both the ability to listen to it and to speak it.  You may also have Auditory Processing Disorder, which affects the way a brain processes sounds.  This makes it very difficult to understand speech, but it’s not the same as a language processing disorder, because once the person does know what the words are (such as with captions), they can then understand them without issue.

I wish I had a clearer answer for you, but the internet was sadly lacking in information :(  We need more scientific studies on autism regarding language, is the conclusion the internet gave me.

This is a question for anyone who often misses what people say and have to ask “what?” or “Please repeat” or “please write it” a lot. For example (not limited to) people who are deaf, hard of hearing, have auditory processing disorder or ADHD or language processing disorder, etc.

Have you ever been able to successfully help someone grasp why it is so rude for them to say “never mind” (or “forget it” etc) to one of us? If so, how did you get the concept through to them?

Now a question for people who used to say “never mind” to people like us, but then learned why you need to stop: What helped you grasp the concept? What helped you understand that a phrase that might seem innocuous when said among hearing non-APD/ADHD people becomes so hurtful when it is said to us? Thanks to all who respond to either question.

This informal poll is inspired by This recent Tumblr conversation on why it is bad to say “never mind”, or “forget it” etc when we ask them to repeat: (conversation started by @deaf-a-rising)  [This text originally cited @guidetodreaming in error, thanks to them for the correction.]

But a lot of the time its a lot more complex than that because language is a lot more complex than that - it's just something that a lot of people with typically-developing language and speech skills take for granted because it comes naturally to them

I was thinking about a response I was trying to say to my fiance as a joke (verbally where we struggle a lot more than written) and had a very kind of funny in-hindsight language "glitch". I was going to use it as an example but I couldn't remember the exact contact and phrasing that made it made sense.

Everything from here is how my brain works and may not apply to all people with language / speech issues.

But often when speaking certain words cluster together into conceptual groupings and they together fall into general functions in sentence structure (adjective) (noun) or (action) (noun) or (pronoun) (noun) and they generate a specific concept and idea together that isn't always the same as when translated individually. Additionally, in my experience, chunks of phrases and semantically similar words (ie words that tend to frequently be used together) are easier to draw upon and tend to be pulled into my awareness / "speaking pool" better than individual words.

So "bite you" "bite me" and "bite that" are all actions of biting something in specific and they tend to register in a chunk and operate much like an independent word probably does to an individual without language / speech issues (I am assuming based on how my written language skills are because I usually have little impact on my writing ability)

Taking that into consideration of that with the fact that sometimes it is just hard to find the phrases I'm looking for and thus a common cheat sheet to getting around that is to use the phrasing of the other person if their words were 'close enough' to what I wanted to say, there are certain moments where something entirely different than what was MEANT to be said is actually spoken.

Again, I don't remember the exact details to make it make sense as an example with just the script but him and I were joking around. He made a joke that it is "his job to bite me" which is a play jab cause we bite him 5x more than the other way around. So I wanted to reply "Bitch no, it's MY job to bite YOU" - but I had issues pulling the words together

To say that I needed to state the subject, the action, and any necessary modifiers.

Modifier: "No" (disagreeing)

Subject: "Your job" "(unlabeled concept of me / mine / I)"

Action: "Bite me" (<-stolen from his original phrasing, "me" is taken because brain said I was missing a word that represents the concept of myself in relation to the sentence and "me" is one of those words that fills that + its conveniently already attached to another word)

So my brain put it together "No your job is to bite me"

Which when put next to what I was TRYING to say, is the exact opposite. And so unreliable speech moment which had us both laugh a bit because I just responded to him saying that it was his job to bite me with "no your job is to bite me" which is silly

I'm mostly curious because in hindsight, we should have noticed our system has significant speaking and speech issues considering us being we were in speech from pre-k to 6th grade - so about 8 years.. which is almost the same amount of time we've been in therapy for everything else