If it’s not for communication, what’s the point? As I didn’t know much at the time, I made a mistake thinking that as soon as my son started speaking, everything would be fine. However, though Alyosha did start talking at the age of seven, ‘talking’ is not the word to describe his verbal utterances. My boy echoed words and phrases that he had heard in the past, often irrelevant to the situation, or just ‘talked’ to himself. There seemed to be words which he especially liked,

To speak (another language) or not to speak (with an autistic child)? Typically developing children in multilingual families tend to pick up languages of their parents quite easily. In contrast to parents of typical multilingual families, parents of a child with ASD often express concerns that a bilingual environment would cause language delay and confusion for their child. This is particularly common for parents of non-verbal and minimally verbal children. Some professionals

In autism, there is laughing/giggling and ‘laughing/giggling’. There can be numerous reasons to laugh, which are difficult to understand by ‘outsiders’: Of course, autistic individuals laugh when they are happy , or if they find something funny. However, they often laugh to release fear, tension and anxiety . What is very difficult for their parents to comprehend (and accept) is that they might laugh or giggle non-stop when someone is crying. This may be one of their defensiv

Not much is known about the language trajectories of non-verbal and minimally verbal children yet. However, the number of research studies are growing. Quite a few research studies have attempted to identify reliable predictors of good language outcomes. For example: Predictors of language development in non-verbal and minimally verbal children Saul and Norbury (2020) followed the expressive language progress of 27 minimally verbal children, aged three to five, for a year. At

At the age of about four months the baby starts babbling and producing different sounds. Vocalisations Interestingly, during the first six month s infants with ASD show a similar to typically developing infants’ rate of vocalizations, the pattern of face-gazing accompanied by vocalizations (Young et al . 2009) and typical behaviour in social-vocal patterns (Chericoni et al . 2016). (At this age, the first signs could be looked for in other areas, such as, for example, motor

According to some researchers (e.g., Ramachandran 1995), it is mirror neurons that allow us to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds"; without these neurons, the child can no longer understand other people’s intentions, emotions and behaviours, and this is the case in autism. It is true that autistic people find it hard to perceive the mental states of others and it has been suggested that the central feature of

Let’s start with linguistics: The way we label things around us means a great deal. Let’s look at the widely used terms in an ‘autistic way’, i.e., literally (without adding any personal connotation – neither positive, nor negative) – each word in this section has its dictionary meaning. - Autism Spectrum : Spectrum is defined as ‘the entire range of particular type of thing, arranged by degree or quality, etc.’; it is used to classify something in terms of positio

Helen, an 11-year-old girl with autism, goes to mainstream school and does very well at all the subjects. But no one at school has ever heard her speak. She used to sit quietly in the classroom rocking her body and seems oblivious to everybody around her. However, her written work is always neat and correct. Her mother says she talks to her family at home, always whispering, but only if there is nobody else present there. If the family’s friends come to visit, she turns into

When Wednesdays are blue, numbers are as cities, and 5 + 2 = yellow … After one of the ‘incidents’ (panic attacks), Alyosha attempted to give his explanation of what had happened: “In the shop I heard black, then the word broke down into pieces and they entered my eye. I became blind because everything was black.” At the time I was bewildered with his explanation, and placed his ‘reports’ into the category ‘confusing’. However, in 2011, I came across the account by Brian King

Seeing or tasting sounds, hearing colours, being touched by sights… Alyosha was about 9 years old when he tried to account for a panic attack by saying: “I was scared. I saw a yellow ‘z-z-z’ sound.” This was confusing, until I realised he had synaesthesia. Synaesthesia (Greek syn – ‘together’ and aesthesis – ‘perception’) or ‘cross-sensory perception’ is an involuntary physical experience when the stimulation of one sensory modality triggers a perception in one or more diffe