New Approaches to Understanding Language in Minimally Verbal Autism Spectrum Disorder (4 of 10)

(November 30, 2018) Plenary Speaker of the conference Helen Tager-Flusberg, Ph.D., the
Director of the Center for Autism Research Excellence at Boston University presents on the importance of language, and findings from new studies on minimally verbal autistic patients.

[urbanhyena]

Thanks for the review and for testing the dominant individualistic theories. Future directions I feel should look at the relationship between the socio political context and speech. The question to ask is, is the language impairment global or context dependent. If its context dependent (which it always is), then the question is what is it about how a person with an autism diagnosis is treated and represented in society. And how does prejudice or discrimination affect language development. I've seen parents who have been informed by clinicians. These clinicians values are ingrained in the medicalised and pathologising discourse. They tend to attribute any attempt to communicate as "wrong" and will often correct their child's speech more so than others who make the same errors. These errors however are about conformity. If language is a social construct then this group of people are being socially excluded. The one take home message I took from this presentation was that ASD people were more receptive than expressive. I was working with a parent who told me not to use certain words because their child would not understand it. Now I can say studies show that your child is more likely to be receptive than expressive so they may not use the word but may understand it. This is of course common knowledge among typically developed people. We all know that we understand more than we can communicate. For some reason though when a person is labelled then the common sense that we have about ourselves is not reflected. I think in this presentation there was some headway to challenge this othering. It was mentioned that computational language studies about general human language production were used instead of niche ASD studies. I agree with this approach, stop the othering. There was a time in my life when I couldnt speak well. That wasn't my impairments, that was because of the lack of access to resources because of the micro aggressions around me. At the end of the day abelsim is playing a key role. Let's see research that acknowledges this and works towards an understanding of truth without the confirmatory bias. Ok so that's my rant ha ha thanks for reading.

[anthonygoldie]

Good information thank you im just starting to learn the ins and outs of autism due to my sons recent diagnosis I did find this helpful

[danc]

What a worthless and shallow study. They should lose funding, and shift it to actual scientists.