Autism

A Unique Sensory, Emotional, and Social Development

Social Interactions and Communications

    Autistic individuals have very poor communication and socialization skills. Often, autistic people are echollalic (repeat a portion of what is said to them), talk nonsense, or don't talk almost at all. Most of their useful speech tends to be limited to making requests. In many cases, the requests consist of single syllables, single words, or sounds and gestures. In all cases in which I have treated very limited speech with autism, the children have also had physical impairments of the vocal apparatus. The tongue, the lips, the facial muscles, and/or the muscles that move the diaphragm may be somewhat atrophied. Often, the vocal apparatus impairment is not noticed until the child starts using more complex speech. The problems tend to show as blurred speech, insufficient breath to support continuous sentences, low or uneven volume in speech (sustaining screams only without words), and getting stuck in the pronunciation of consonants, such as l,  r, k, and g. Often, there is also lack of motor planning ability, causing the speech problems to increase as the sentences increase in length. (Motor planning is the mental creation of the movements needed to perform an action and the corresponding ability to turn those planned movements into the planned action.) Oral motor training conducted by a speech therapist can rectify or reduce many of  these speech problems.

    The combination of the autistic child’s poor communication and unique response to stimuli always results in a very unique development of social interaction. Add parental over-protection and the fact that most people give up on requiring autistic children to interact correctly, and the result is a very deficient pro-social behavior.

    Pro-social behaviors are the behaviors that engage others in social participation with us. The best example of a pro-social behavior is a smile. Smiling makes others like us and want to have interactions with us. Pro-social is the opposite of anti-social.