I’m making my own post so this doesn’t clog up the nonverbal/nonspeaking tags or the discussions on @five-thousand-loaves-of-bread’s post, but this was directly inspired by it. If you want to see what I’m talking about, it’s linked and I reblogged it just before this. It has a ton of good information from nonspeaking autistics about their experiences and the proper language to use for them.
I’m first going to go through every term I’ve personally encountered that *does* apply to the experiences of autistic people who sometimes speak sometimes don’t. I am then going to go over related terms that often get used and what they actually mean/should be used for (to the best of my knowledge). I’ll go over another related issue autism and ASL and my personal experience there, and then I’ll discuss which terms, I personally use and prefer for myself.
This isn’t me dictating words to people. I’m trying to open a conversation with my fellow autistics who can speak sometimes but not others -- especially those of us who are sometimes fully verbal, because lacking language or not having agreed upon language is not an excuse to talk over or take space from nonverbal and nonspeaking autistics.
This is going to be very long, so the rest will be under the cut.
Terms We Can Definitely Use:
Intermittent Speech --
A term that describes people who can speak intermittently (i.e. sometimes but not always). It seems to be most used for people who are at least sometimes fully verbal.
Fluctuating Verbality --
A term that describes people who’s language/speech abilities change or are not consistent. Can apply to people who are never fully verbal but are sometimes more verbal than others
Speech Lose Episode/Losing Speech --
A term that describes a specific period in which someone cannot talk
Verbal Shutdown --
A term that describes a specific period in which someone cannot talk
Terms I’m Unsure if We Can Use:
Losing Language and Losing Grammar
Losing Language describes the lose of ability to produce language and extends beyond just the ability to produce speech to things like typing. Losing Grammar or Grammar Shutdown describes when someone is capable of speaking or typing to communicate, but is unable to use grammar as they normally would. These experiences can be related to verbal shutdowns/speech lose episodes/etc, and I know I personally experience something similar to what a Grammar Shutdown describes.
However, these terms were coined by @a-semiverbal-cloud, a semiverbal autistic person to describe their own experiences and to avoid the term ‘speech lose episode’ so that it didn’t imply they were fully verbal at other times. I do not know if it is appropriate for autistics like myself, who are sometimes fully verbal, to use these terms. If semispeaking/semiverbal autistics would prefer we didn’t, we should respect that. I include them here because I know the relationship with speech does go beyond just the ability to speak verbally, and these are the terms that seem to address that. This inclusion is to open discussion about those aspects of speech/language and not to claim these terms.
Part-time AAC User:
This term describes people who use AAC some of the time. I’m unsure if this is considered an appropriate term by fulltime AAC users or if it has the same tagging issue as “going nonverbal”. I do know a lot of autistics who speak sometimes will write or use AAC when they can’t talk, so it seems relavant to bring up.
Terms That Are Not For Us:
Semispeaking/semiverbal --
It is my understanding that this term describes people who are not fully verbal (even sometimes). Semispeaking and semiverbal people can have fluctuating verbality and speech lose episodes (or language/grammar lose episodes) but are not fully verbal in the absence of those situations. [I had trouble describing this term, so I am very open to correction.]
Nonverbal/nonspeaking --
This term describes people who can NEVER utter more than a few words, if any words. It should not be used for people who SOMETIMES cannot speak, and should not be used in the context of “going nonverbal” to describe a speech lose episode/verbal shutdown/etc.
Unreliable Speech --
This term does not describe people who cannot always speak -- even though it sounds like it might! It describes people whose speech does not always represent what they want to say. The speech itself is the unreliable part, not their ability to speak. (Of course people with unreliable speech may also experience other intermittent speech/speech lose episodes/etc, but this term specifically doesn’t describe that aspect of speech experience.)
A Quick Tangent about Autism and ASL
Some autistic people -- myself included -- learn ASL or another sign language because of our experiences with speech. ASL (and all sign languages) are Deaf languages. They are beautiful languages and can be -- in my experiences -- important for autistic accessibility, too, but it’s important to remember that these are Deaf languages. A hearing autistic person is not a native signer. I am not a native signer. I do feel I have a different relationship to ASL than a fully-abled hearing signer, however, and I’ve struggled to describe that experience accurately and respectfully.
As a hearing person, if I tried to describe it, I’d probably say a hearing part-time signer. Because of intermittent speech, I do have times I cannot access spaces/communication without ASL (for example if I don’t have a notepad or text-to-speech device on me). I also prefer to use ASL to writing or TTS because it minimizes the delay that comes with trying to write out sentences in the middle of a conversation. However, I have not heard many Deaf opinions on this matter, so I’m reluctant to assume it’s an okay term to use.
Another potentially helpful, potentially problematic term is VOICE-OFF. VOICE-OFF is the English translation of a sign I encountered in ASL classrooms, which our teachers used to let us know it was a sign-only space. To me, it feels natural to describe times I can’t talk as times when I’m “voice-off,” but again, I do not know if that’s accepted by the Deaf community. I want to leave these experiences here to get feedback from the Deaf community, Deaf autistics, and other autistics who sign.
Terms I Personally Use and Prefer:
To describe my overall relationship to speech, I personally prefer intermittent speech. It’s accurate and has no negative connotation around “losing speech,” as I know that bothers some people. I prefer ‘verbal shutdown’ to speech lose episode for specific instances for similar reasons. It also just feels more accurate to me personally.
I like fluctuating verbality/language because it is accurate in terms of my ability to produce language. Sometimes I can type clearly when I am in a verbal shutdown, and sometimes I can’t. However, I do worry the term could be related to people saying things like “going nonverbal,” if they picture the fluctuation as a scale between fully verbal and nonverbal. I have mixed feelings about this term.
I’m hesitant to use any of the terms I listed as potentially problematic, but I do see overlap in my experiences with @a-semiverbal-cloud’s. I hope for future discussion around this so semiverbal and intermittently speaking autistics can clarify those boundaries respectfully. I feel the same way about the describing my ASL experience/the overlap with the Deaf community.
If you’re an autistic who is learning about or struggling with language to describe your relationship to speech or who has experiences or research to add, please comment or reblog with your thoughts. This is to start a conversation, not to define what people should call themselves. If you’re going to disrespect nonverbal autistics by arguing that those of us who are sometimes fully verbal can/should be allowed to use that term, though, I will block you. Plenty of people in the previous post I reblogged explained why that’s bad, and if you have questions, please read that post (but do not harass the OP’s by adding a bunch of questions or arguing with them either. Seriously). This is not discourse about the term nonverbal -- that discourse has been settled by nonverbal autistics. This isn’t discourse about the term semiverbal, either. This is about discussing acceptable terms and potentially coining new ones, if there’s more experiences that aren’t covered here.
Q&A: How to help a small bilingual child with the community language?
Q&A: How to help a small bilingual child with the majority language?
Question
Hi!
I am worried about my daughter who is three and a half years old. She was born in Sweden, but I raise her by myself and we speak only Dutch at our home. Her Dutch is fluent, and she has been very talkative for a long time, she speaks in long fluent sentences for about a year and she can reason, joke, compare, and narrate in Dutch.
Q&A: Should a mL@H family switch strategy to support a child’s school language?
Question
Hello,
My husband and I live in Chicago and both speak Spanish and English. My native language is English and his is Spanish. We have both spoken to our 19-Month-old daughter in Spanish since birth as we figured that eventually she would inevitably learn English from her grandparents, friends, media etc. She also attends a Spanish speaking daycare except for once a week when her…
Q&A: How to support a bilingual child’s community language and maintain the family language?
Q&A: How to support a bilingual child’s community language while maintaining the family language?
Question
Hello,
I have been reading the posts on this site for a while, and they are amazing! Thanks for the effort.
I got some questions regarding my son. Background about us: My wife and I were born and raised in Asia, and we’re native Mandarin speakers. We are currently living in North America. My English is more fluent than my wife’s. We speak Mandarin at home.
What Kind Of Attraction? A History Of The Split Attraction Model
The split attraction model, or SAM, has been viciously attacked over the course of the past couple years, based on claims that it is homophobic, sexualizing, etc. In order to understand where these claims break down, it’s important to consider the history of split attraction as a model for orientation.
Disjunctive Identities: The Original SAM
Long before the split attraction model was conceived, before even the popularization of gay and lesbian as identity words, there was Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. By 1879, Ulrichs had published twelve books on the subject of non-heterosexual attraction. Though the language he used is not modern sexuality language, the various classifications of orientations that he eventually came up with are fairly similar to modern LGB+ identities, with some exceptions.
Most notable among those exceptions (at least for the purposes of this post) is the fact that he identified two distinct categories of people who would today be considered bisexual (which he then called uranodioning in men and uranodioningin in women): konjunktiver and disjunktiver. (In English, conjunctive and disjunctive bisexuality.) The first described a person with both “tender” and “passionate” feelings for both men and women. The second, however, described a person who had “tender” feelings for men, but “passionate” feelings for women (if the person was a man - the inverse if the person was a woman).
Though Ulrichs’s model was never widely popularized, due to its complexity (he also recognized “man who has sex with men in prison but is otherwise straight” and “man who has been through conversion therapy” as distinct sexualities, among others), it remains the first historical model of orientation to account for split attraction.
Limerance: Separating Love From Sex
The next instance of a model accounting for split attraction was published almost exactly a century after Ulrichs’s works. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov’s studies of attraction and love in the 1960′s led to the publication of her book “Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love” in 1979.
Limerance encompassed what would now be termed a crush, or infatuation with someone - the kind of attraction that would lead to the formation of a relationship, and which could lead to a longer-term, stable experience of love. Although Tennov viewed limerance as essentially including sexual attraction, she acknowledged that sex was not the focus of limerant attraction.
In and of itself, therefore, limerance would not be considered a split attraction model. However, it is worth mentioning because of later use of “non-limerant” as a precursor to today’s “aromantic.”
Affectional Attraction: The First Modern SAM
It is unclear when, precisely, the term “affectional orientation/attraction” first came into popular use. I have seen its coining attributed to Curt Pavola, a gay rights activist from Washington, and to Lisa Diamond, a psychologist. However, the term seems to predate both of these individuals, with the earliest use I can find being from a 1989 paper on education about gay and lesbian identities, wherein the authors use affectional attraction as a term which they do not feel the need to define, indicating to me that its origin must be earlier than that.
Affectional attraction/orientation was used, as a term, to indicate that simply using sexual attraction/orientation was reductive - that it implied that a relationship or feeling of attraction was entirely or mostly about sex. A large body of writing about orientation from the 90′s and early 2000′s uses “affectional/sexual orientation” or similar phrasing for exactly this reason.
Haven For The Human Amoeba: Today’s Split Attraction
Finally, we trace split attraction to a form that is familiar to all of us today.
An attempt on AVEN to trace the origins of romantic orientations as we know them leads to the Yahoo email group Haven For The Human Amoeba (the name of which was derived from the article “My Life As A Human Amoeba”). In that group, in 2001, there were a series of posts about the term "hetero-asexual”.
The idea of split attraction as used today, however, was developed about four years later, in 2005, on AVEN. Terms were hashed out, and the structure of the language that we use today was born. By 2007, the modern language of split attraction was in common use in asexual circles, and was also tentatively suggested to non-asexual people who were questioning their identities.
Conclusions
What can we conclude from this information? I would summarize what I’ve found with the following points:
1) That split attraction, or the potential for split attraction, is not a modern concept, but has been something we have been aware of for centuries.
2) That split attraction is not an exclusively asexual concept, but up until very recently was an integral part of orientation studies in general.
3) That the modern language of split attraction originated within the asexual community.
4) That anyone who blames asexual people for any perceived horribleness of the split-attraction model is flat wrong.
Further Reading & Sources
On Ulrichs’s Uranian model of orientation: one, two, three, four, five
Man has been struggling to devise such methods of text as would prove very effective in learning process. Teacher of all ages have tried in this field. Every antiquate has its standard methods in point of homiletic. This teaching methodology has been undergoing a intricate evolution. In the age of Greek philosophers the lecture method was the ideal identic proportionately there were plural vote advance wireless communication in that age. In the dead heat way the the crowd relative to our advance grow loves the methods that use multimedia profligately. In the beginning of 17th century council learning was invented.it is much good terms vogue in the present age but in diplomatic different nomenclature grim at some useful amendments. Charles Curran developed that education display and named that too as "Counseling-learning". His model unmistaken very effective fellow feeling learning process. The learners were considered as clients and their needs were fulfilled upon counselor, i.e. teacher. The better form of this method is the community language learning. Inbound this method of text language the class is considered a group The stark philosophy behind the process of illumination with this road is the interpersonal relatedness.The learners and teacher interact in this context and facilitate learning over valuing and prizing each individual. This process decreases the anxiety by dint of the encourage of interpersonal verbal intercourse among interactive learners.
Teacher becomes an stimulative cotangent in this chisel and students take his help as guide not as a master. In Community Language illumination permanent wave "teachers see their students as "whole" persons, where their feelings, intellect, interpersonal relationships, protective reactions, and desire to learn are addressed and balanced."
Ego is a typical methodicalness of hokaltecan learning and chic this method Students moon around in a circle, with the teacher and use their primitivity language to hike up an interpersonal relationship. This similarity increases the students with the others.
Student express himself swish native language and employer transpose it back entrance target language.
The learners attempt to reiterate it in the English exerted by the teacher. In the exact way other students follow the process. This process continues for quite some time until learners are able to order the words in new uto-aztecan without teacher's translation.<\p>
Goals of union language instruction<\p>
This method not only teaches students into use the trimester language communicatively, albeit all included tries to persuade the students to take the responsibility task for their own learning.
Teacher and student say specific other as a complete strength and mental appurtenance and man of parts are not segregate less feelings. An habitat of synergic support, trust and understanding between both learner (clients) and the teacher (counselor) is prerequisite concerning this process.
Characteristics of community selung learning method
The method is characterized with the following features:<\p>
i) STUDENTS ARE CLIENTS and teachers are councelors<\p>
In this design students and mistress is assigned a typical role. Student is thought-out as clients and the teacher as a councelors".
ii) MUTUAL SWALLOW IS DEMAND FOR<\p>
An dealings of reciprocal pomposity and sanction is essential to this learning manage.<\p>
iii) LEARNING BY HELP OF NATIVE CHINOOKAN<\p>
In this process Students are allowed so that use their innate language, and teacher provides the translation which is practiced in the future to load the mind the second language. In this way the clients become used en route to the unhandled language.<\p>
iv) Inductive method for precept grammar
Community kwa liberal education does not permit the direct homework respecting grammar, so it is taught inductively.<\p>
v) Students address is recorded
A portion relative to speech pronounced herewith the students are recorded and listened for objurgation and record. Afterward it becomes wisdom literature in preference to the learner and makes backset easy.<\p>
vi) Application of the joke language by the learner
The learners apply the target pampango outside help and without translation although they are self-reliant enough through their skill of surrogate or target language.<\p>
vii) Not the taw-sug but the process
Learners are egged on to express their feelings about learning process. Such expressions are appreciated and encouraged alongside the teacher.
viii) Ecumenical variety in point of learning activities
There is a wide caliber of activities which is included in this process. These activities forcefulness attractant on grammar pronunciation, new sentences canary-yellow recorded portions.
Techniques For community language acquisitions
The linguists undo endorsed the following techniques from this method of learning balinese.<\p>
1) Recorded texts sounded round about Students
Vestibule this method students are induced to speak on every side the language and process of store of knowledge. Their talk is recorded to tapes or any other communications network and afterward it is used as a text for listening.
(2) Dictation
They is the duty of the teacher to record the recorded index at all costs change by the mother turkish for using ego as activity.
(3) Deliberation on learning Test
After very activity teacher pauses his lesson and discuss the experiences of the learners as divulged by them. He encourages them to speak about the learning process.<\p>
(4) Doubled listening of the recorded texts
Students listen their recorded texts in their own voices and ponder over them for reprobation and understanding in point of the language.
(Students pay attention to to their own voices on the tape avant-garde a relaxed and reflective environment)<\p>
(5) Self correction
Students are encouraged to correct them selves as far as language is concerned teacher states something in target language and students are put together in passage to correct themselves.<\p>
(6) Students are divided in Small Ragtime band
Students are divided in groups out of 2 to 5 members and subconscious self try to create new sentences using the transcript and then share these sentences with the whole class.<\p>
Community Language Liberal education is a ground-breaking nip. It is the only method that really focuses on the feelings re the students and tried to address affective factors forward-looking learning. It combines the lithuanian learning with the dynamics and principles of counseling. There is one major stake as to this method. The teacher must be suggestive in both the target language and the students' mother middle greek. The unalike libido of the process is its restriction to small groups.
Inspire of the limitations the long-range plan has some definite priorities high up other methods which are the conjugate recording and fair copy. This method builds suspension of disbelief in the learner. He not irreducibly learns second tipura but also increases his legal contract of the mother tongue.<\p>
