Anemone's Research Emporium

Language versus communication: Where's the research?

Anemone Cerridwen
February 25, 2009

They say that if only they could get autistic kids to talk, everything would be ok. Well, maybe it would be a big improvement, in situations where there is a serious language delay, but you're not out of the woods once you can talk. You still have to be able to communicate effectively, and that can be brutal for autistic adults.

I haven't seen any research out there. I certainly haven't seen any popular discussion on this. So if you know of any, please tell me. In the meantime, this is my best effort at figuring out what might be going on.

For this discussion, I rely heavily on the textbook Human communication disorders: An introduction, seventh edition, by Noma B. Anderson and George H. Shames, 2006. This book is a great introduction to communication disorders, except for what it's missing.

Quick summary #1: Overall, communication is made up speech, language, and communication that isn't speech and language (the authors list them in reverse order: communication, language, and speech). You don't need speech to have language (you can use writing or sign language instead), but you don't get far with speech if you don't have language. And you don't need language to have communication. We are the only species with true language, and language is more precise and powerful than non-language communication, but other species communicate just fine without it.

Quick summary #2: The authors have an entire section on language and language disorders (developmental language delay; receptive language delay; specific language impairments; aphasia). They also have an entire section on speech and speech disorders (disarthia; apraxia of speech; articulation problems; stuttering). But they have a total of only a few pages dedicated to communication that does not involve language or speech, and they don't mention any impairments related to this area. To me this is a big hole that needs to be filled.

What if?

What if one of the domains autistic people struggle with is this non-language non-speech side of communication? The animal side of communication? What if autism is the non-language communication equivalent of aphasia or apraxia, about which so much is known? I'm not saying that that is all autism is, or even that autism definitely includes this, but what if the problems we have with communication are mostly in this unexplored domain of animal-level communication? Surely this would be worth investigating?

I know that I communicate more effectively in writing than in person, and that this is common among autistic people. This is the opposite of what happens when people are aphasic - they can usually communicate more effectively in person, because they can fall back on nonverbals to compensate for weaknesses in language complexity. So autistic people don't lack language as a group, though there are language delays for some of us.

I also know that I personally am terrible on the phone, and do somewhat better in person, even though I'm much better in writing. This tells me that I rely heavily on the nonverbals you get in in-person conversation to figure out what is going on. I'm not saying I'm as good at nonverbals as the average person - I don't know if I am or not. But I do use them, so I have some ability here. I don't know how common this pattern is with autistic people, but I know that many of us are terrible at talking on the phone (though not all).

So this suggests to me that the communication breakdown lies in the aspects of communication that are non-language, but not the nonverbal aspects of non-language communication.

The authors of this text divide communication into language + paralinguistics (signalling attitude or emotion) + nonlinguistics (body language) + metalinguistics (cognitive skills needed to analyze language). It's not language that's the problem (see above), so is there a problem with one of the others?

Paralinguistics involves the signalling of attitude or emotion. It includes intonation, stress, rate of delivery and pauses in communication. I rely very heavily on these in in-person and on-phone conversations, though I don't seem to miss them in written communication. I may or may not be bad at them, but I depend on them, so I don't think this is the key deficit.

Nonlinguistics (body language) includes gestures, body posture, facial expression, eye contact, head and body movements, and physical distance. I know I personally am not as good at this as I am at paralinguistics, but my superiority in person over on the phone suggests that I also rely heavily on these to communicate.

The last one, metalinguistics, involves analyzing the content of the conversation. At this point some of you may be jumping up and down excitedly thinking of theory of mind. Sorry, that's a whole other post or ten. Metalinguistics can actually include many things besides cognitive processing ability. For example, it is very hard to understand someone when they talk about something completely outside your personal experience. It is also very hard to communicate when the information is filtered through a wall of prejudice. Theory of mind (sensu stricto) can also contribute to this area, of course, but it is not the only aspect of metalinguistics, and I think it is a mistake to focus on it to the exclusion of other possibilities. It is still early days yet when it comes to researching autism, after all. Beyond this I have no idea what to include in this area, but it is worth investigating all of the possibilities, including how much of the barrier to communication involves living in a different world from our listeners. You never know.

And then there is coordination of interpersonal interaction. I don't know if this is a separate category or fits into one of the three above. It includes processing "multiple pieces of linguistic information simultaneously, and flexibly alternate among the communication modalities of listening, speaking, reading, and writing" [Anderson and Shames, page 354].

Now this I know I'm terrible at.

Consider the following communication tasks:

• social coordination
  • turn taking
  • maintaining/repairing interactions
• mental coordination
  • process multiple pieces of information simultaneously
  • switch easily between input and output
  • switch easily between different modalities
  • coordination of thoughts/ideas
• decoding input of all kinds
• encoding output of all kinds

Now imagine that the corresponding disorder for these abilities is autism and other pervasive developmental disorders.

coordination of communication : autism?
language : aphasia etc.
speech : apraxia etc.

What is the point to this?

Imagine a text book like the one I cite above, only there is a multi-chapter section on language and language disorders, a multi-chapter section on speech and speech disorders, and a multi-chapter section on non-language, non-speech communication and communication disorders. I have no idea what would be in that final section, but I bet it would clear up a lot of confusion. So where is it?

My wish: Research on the animal level of communication, based on typically functioning people, not on autistic performance. Then an objective comparison of how people usually do in this area and how autistic people usually do, to see if this stuff has anything to do with any of the impairments autistic people have to deal with. That's all.

Reference

Noma B. Anderson and George H. Shames, 2006. Human communication disorders: An introduction. Seventh edition. Boston: Pearson.