To participate in a conversation in a neat way, people need to master three basic skills that are taught to five-year-olds. While many autists don’t start talking until they are six and are never taught this.
Five-year-olds are encouraged to ask questions of parents who often don’t listen, are often uninterested and often don’t understand the question. From this they learn that:
- If people don’t look at you, they don’t listen
- When people look at the ceiling and yawn, they are not interested
- If their facial expression changes to something that fits your story, then they’ve understood you
A psychologist who was invited by the Rotterdam autists club in 2008 to provide information about the latest developments, told us that research had shown that autists recognize facial expressions 0.5 s faster than neurotypicals.
Mental health institutions have been aware of conversational skills since 1988. But they carefully kept this a secret so that they could continue to make money by treating abnormal behavior.
Autists need three additional skills:
- Dealing with eye contact
- Dealing with annoying comments
- Dealing with attention span
- Autists only make eye contact when they have a conflict. As a result, they experience eye contact as threatening. Nevertheless, it is possible to learn to check every now and then to see if people are watching you.
- Recognizing jokes is very easy. The rule is always answer an odd comment with an odd comment. This way you either acknowledge a joke or you acknowledge that you misunderstood a serieus remark.
- Autists have a photographic memory and a visual thought process. They can casually give a lecture of hours. This is a problem because neurotypicals have an attention span of 5 minutes. If your story takes longer, they yawn, look at the ceiling and walk away.
Neurotypicals have an innate language center that allows them to start babbling at the age of two. Many autistic people lack that innate language center but do have a photographic memory.
When a child still does not talk by the time hi is three, parents worry. To find out if the child might be deaf, they start talking to the child very specifically. Making autistic children discover that some sounds are more important than others. Autistic children listen to the conversations going on around them. They need three years to memorize enough of the vocabulary to start talking.
I didn’t start talking until I was nine.
My mother was English and my father was Dutch. Living in the Netherlands my parents have always spoken English among themselves and Dutch with their children. I will probably have discovered around the age of six that I could not understand the children at school. I made it a habit to watch the news and read my father’s newspaper, to learn the Dutch vocabulary. When I was eight years old, I was placed in a boarding school, where I was immersed, as it were, in the Dutch vocabulary. When I was nine I spoke an average of one sentence a week. By the time I returned home at age 11, I was able to have conversations with counselors.