Communication
Study on Speech Processing
Published May 28, 2009 @ 04:00PM PT
[Another time it seems Kristina and I hooked on the same article. This seemed different enough from what Kristina wrote to still run though. I hope!]
I would take the title of the article "Scientists Reaching Consensus On How Brain Processes Speech" with a warehouse full of salt, but the core idea seems to be that areas of the brain which process speech are starting to be identified (if one can believe the science reporting). The model presented in the article is a "two parallel pathway" idea,
These pathways are dubbed the "what" and "where" streams and are roughly analogous to how the brain processes sight, but are located in different regions, says Rauschecker, a professor in the department of physiology and biophysics and a member of the Georgetown Institute for Cognitive and Computational Sciences.
Both pathways begin with the processing of signals in the auditory cortex, located inside a deep fissure on the side of the brain underneath the temples - the so-called "temporal lobe." Information processed by the "what" pathway then flows forward along the outside of the temporal lobe, and the job of that pathway is to recognize complex auditory signals, which include communication sounds and their meaning (semantics). The "where" pathway is mostly in the parietal lobe, above the temporal lobe, and it processes spatial aspects of a sound - its location and its motion in space - but is also involved in providing feedback during the act of speaking.
If processing speech involves different brainstuffs (e.g., auditory cortex) than processing, for example, writing (or other visually based) or felt language (e.g., Braille), perhaps this suggests why some autistic people (myself included) do significantly better with communication in a non-speech/hearing medium. Speech is not communication--it is simply one way that communication can occur. Speech is also not language, although language can be (but does not have to be) spoken.
Sounding Off
Published May 27, 2009 @ 02:14PM PT
Autism is defined, described, explained in many and various ways (indeed---what's your top way of answering the "what is autism?" question?). And here's another way to answer the question:
Autism involves "problems in comprehending auditory signals" according to the author of a new study in the June Nature Neuroscience about how the human brain processes speech and language. Josef Rauschecker of the Georgetown University Medical Center and Sophie Scott of University College London have found that, in both humans and non-human primates, speech is processed in the brain "along two parallel pathways, each of which run from lower- to higher-functioning neural regions," as noted in a Medical.Net review. Further, both pathways begin with the processing of speech in the auditory cortex.
While the study is looking specifically at how the brain functions, I was curious about Rauschecker's specific mention of autism and the processing of auditory signals. He says:
"Understanding speech is one of the major problems seen in autism, and a person with schizophrenia hears sounds that are just hallucinations......Eventually, this area of research will lead us to better treatment for these issues.
"But mostly, we are fascinated by the fact that humans can make such exquisite sense of the slight variation in sound waves that reach our ears, and only lately have we been able to model how the brain knows how to attach meaning to these sounds in terms of communication." he says.
We've long observed that "something happens" between Charlie hearing sounds and his mind translating them into meaning. It's been established that his hearing is fine. Understanding speech---the spoken word---has long confounded Charlie, and he also struggles a great deal to use speech himself. But music (including the human voice singing) is a completely different matter for Charlie. He's always been attentive to the tone, rhythm, pitch of the human voice (more so than to individual words, we've observed), and to sounds (including those made by inanimate objects like the garage door opener and the microwave oven).
And then a couple of months back Charlie was repeatedly making some sort of coughing noise (whether he had to cough or not) and, on one of our afternoon walks, he made the noise and someone responded.
A Canadian goose.
(Guess who was more startled to hear another species in an exchange of sounds?)
See the complete abstract by clicking "read more."
Autistic Intuition
Published May 25, 2009 @ 04:00PM PT
In California, Adults with autism run Camarillo school for kids with autism.
The national chairwoman of the Autism Society of America, Dr. Cathy Pratt, said she has heard of it, but it is still fairly rare in America. Pratt thinks it makes perfect sense.
"They have an intuitive understanding of the behavior. They can interpret the signs," said Pratt, who is based out of the University of Indiana.
So often autistic people are sold short, accused of having no intuitive understanding of behavior in a generalized sense. So it's nice to hear someone give us a bit more credit for a change--that we may well have perfectly good intuition for understanding autistic behavior. An idea that definitely gets no argument from me (especially as someone who has been, at times, asked to "interpret the signs" for non-auties).
It's hard for anyone to understand a perspective that is radically different from their own. For those without a DSM diagnosis, the phenomena is called cognitive bias. I've read books with entire chapters devoted to strategies for how to help non-autistic people learn better how to see past their own perspective, and how to demolish cognitive biases. It's also the issue behind cultural competence.
Perhaps it's time to re-think stereotypes about autistics' ability to understand the behavior of others.
The Language of Love
Published May 20, 2009 @ 04:00PM PT
[Ed. Thank you Meg for this guest post]
Today my husband and I are celebrating our 21st anniversary. Our son, who has been studying engineering at an out-of-state university, is home for the summer. Our daughter is finishing up her junior year of high school. It's a bright sunny day, and there is a bird chirping happily just outside the window. I feel blessed to be in this moment.
We met as students in the campus arcade, where by chance we both liked the same video game. He was quite talkative and had a large group of friends, while I was less outgoing. Despite our differences, we got along well. By the time we got married, we had known each other almost five years, and we rarely disagreed on anything of major importance.
Our most significant challenge was realizing that we sometimes misread each other's nonverbal communication. Much of the meaning in a conversation can come from the voice itself, as Kristina Chew recently wrote. I tend to speak in a rather flat tone that may not fully convey my emotions. Sometimes when I was feeling tired or stressed, my husband would misread my voice and react defensively, thinking that I was angry with him. I would then notice his change of tone and start feeling defensive myself, mistakenly assuming that he was upset about something in the actual words I had said. It took quite a few "But I wasn't angry!" conversations before we learned to always give each other the benefit of the doubt in this regard.
As with any marriage or relationship, we have had to put active effort into understanding each other and accepting differences. In my view, this is not necessarily harder to do when partners are from different cultures or when one partner is Autistic, although communication issues may be more noticeable. After all, there are many kinds of adjustments that have to be made for any relationship to succeed, and not everyone is going to perceive the same ones as being easier or harder.
Spouse Diagnosing Spouse
Published May 16, 2009 @ 03:45PM PT
It must be modern love: In the "Modern Love column of tomorrow's New York Times, David Finch, a marketing engineer for a semiconductor company near Chicago, writes about how his wife, Kristen, diagnosed him with Asperger's Syndrome. Kristen is a speech pathologist who's worked with severely autistic children and also children with Asperger's. In their their year of marriage, Finch writes that he'd become "cynical and withdrawn, obsessive and preoccupied, dismissive and unhelpful"; Kristen had her "suspicions" and administers an online test for Asperger's after which, as Finch writes:
I laughed and cried as the questions so perfectly revealed me. My score: 155 out of 200. That meant, as Kristen put it, “a whole lot of Asperger’s” — an armchair diagnosis that would later be seconded by a health-care professional.
I’d spent two decades trying to understand why I didn’t fit in. Now I had my answer. As a control, Kristen evaluated herself. Her score: 8.
With the data on the table, it was obvious. But naming my problem was one thing. Fixing it was something else altogether. How does someone with Asperger’s rid himself of the very coping mechanisms that allow for day-to-day functioning?
Autism spectrum disorders are not cured with medication, but their associated behaviors can be worked with. What I needed initially were communication skills and a sense of empathy, neither of which, in my case, had been factory-installed.
His wife being a speech pathologist, instruction in communication and dealing with anxiety (when his routine is disrupted, when he has to do something that he does not want to--such as family get-togethers) are readily provided. As Finch writes, "we're not out of the socially crippling woods yet, and we probably never will be"; nonetheless he writes, " I’m a good patient, and we’ve made steady progress." And there's more than might be thought in that last "we," perhaps a tacit acknowledge not only of his own efforts to communicate better, but of his wife's to understand his and his needs.
There's a novel, Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee in which the protagonist's wife is a speech therapist; Henry Park, the first-person narrator, is an "undercover operative for a vaguely sinister private intelligence agency" who's loath to reveal what he actually does---who he actually is---to his wife. There's a tragedy (or rather, tragedies) in the novel, which traces Park's gradually learning to understand himself. No, there's no mention of Asperger's in the novel, though I've often thought (for what it's worth) it possible to "diagnose" the character of Henry Park with it.
And no, I'm not diagnosing my own Jim with it---he (and I) already have our own diagnoses.
Guess that's modern love for you.
Sounds Like It Feels
Published May 16, 2009 @ 12:23AM PT
In a study published in the May 14th online issue of Current Biology, Swiss researchers found that how a person says a word---with what tone and inflection---reveals whatever emotion they are feeling:
The researchers scanned the brains of 22 subjects -- 13 women, nine men -- as they listened to the voices of actors saying a "pseudosentence," which is a sentence of words that sound real but are actually made up.
The actors spoke the words in five ways -- with sadness, anger, joy, relief or a neutral tone. Using functional MRIs, the researchers tried to see if they could determine what emotion the subjects heard by looking at the reactions of their brains.
........
The researchers discovered that each emotion left a different "signature" in the part of the brain that handles the processing of sound.
"This should give insights into the way emotions are coded in the brain, but also tools to assess how different people experience events in different conditions," Vuilleumier said.
The research suggests that the brain considers emotion early on, as it processes sound, said Duke University neuroscientist Scott Huettel, who's familiar with the findings.
I've noted frequently that, while my son has limited speech and huge difficulties in processing words and language, he's often quite attuned to and aware of what is being said around us; he indeed seems to be very attentive to the "music" of language---to rhythm, tone, pitch, inflection. Words can be very loaded for him, with single words ("Gong Gong Po Po"---Cantonese for maternal grandfather and maternal grandmother; "burger"; "photos") having associations and meaning that go quite beyond their dictionary definitions. He often says these over-loaded words/phrases with a distinct pitch and tone, with a sort of melody, and often it's that melody that tips us off to how Charlie is feeling.
It's also noted that
"It's not clear whether the brain works the same way when it tries to understand emotion in written words, such as those in e-mails or text messages. "For the vast majority of people [in history], emotion as conveyed in written words is pretty modern," Huettel said. "You can think of how recently literacy has taken hold."
This is very much the case for Charlie whose efforts to learn to read continue---or rather, his efforts to learn to read words continue. Charlie learned to read music readily and quite quickly when he first learned to play the piano. In reading music, you see the note, you play the note, you hear the note, and those little black circles and lines are given instant, sonic, meaning. And while words and language and speech require Charlie to pause to process it all, music is something he's always liked---maybe I should rather say, has loved, and needs.
Jim and I got Charlie a new blue iPod a month ago as an early birthday gift. It's actually his fourth: The first (the original iPod Nano) that had Sesame Street songs on it (Charlie was about 6 then) flew through the air a few too many times, and I knew it was bad when an X appeared on the screen. #2 iPod ended up in a certain bathroom fixture from which there is no return. #3 was a little Shuffle that Charlie never was inclined towards; made me think that he really needed a screen for the visuals. So far it's been so good. Charlie learned to wear big noise-cancelling headphones this year; he never liked those little white earbuds too much.
Friday Charlie and I went into New York to celebrate Charlie's birthday. We planned to meet Jim at his office in midtown Manhattan and, after parking in Jersey City by my office, walked down Kennedy Boulevard to the PATH station. We took the B train up to Columbus Circle where we met Jim at Whole Foods and Charlie had his choice of whatever he wanted for his birthday dinner (which was pleasantly consumer in Jim's office). On the 1 train, Charlie asked for his iPod and headphones and kept them on as we walked a couple of blocks to the WTC PATH train, and on the PATH train, and back down Kennedy Boulevard, and all the time in the car till we got back home.
And the words of the scientist Huettel make a lot of sense to me:
"For the vast majority of people [in history], emotion as conveyed in written words is pretty modern........You can think of how recently literacy has taken hold."
It's a reminder to me that my Charlie's expressing plenty of the emotion that he feels, though not in words---and maybe they're not the best way to convey such, anyways.
Quick Review on Quick Communication
Published May 14, 2009 @ 10:32AM PT
Last week I used my new iPhone-as-communiation-device quite heavily and thus now have a real review on how the device functioned for me "in the field."
Joel Smith wrote an article Top Ten "Most Wanted" AAC Features which lists his top 10 features. It's a great list, so here is the device reviewed vs. each feature.
1) Durability: See stress test information aboutiPhone or iTouch.
2) Reliability: From Joel Smith's article, "There is no excuse for a device to crash, emit squeals or whispers instead of the desired voice, needing to be "rebooted," etc." On the downside, the software did crash out, more than once, when I was programming it, as happened in the demo video. On the upside, the software comes back to life even faster than seen in the demo video. Also of note is that checking email or running other processor-intensive applications will impact the reliability of the speech software, noticeably, and significantly enough so that the device is no longer adequate for communication (e.g., a 10+ second pause before something is spoken is not acceptable). Avoid requesting email, a web page, or otherwise have anything else "running" on the device in the background if the communication software is to to respond quickly enough to be viable.
3) Portability: The freedom to walk around with the device, to put it in a pocket and have hands free and then pull it out again and speak--to not have to lug 6 pounds of equipment everywhere, be worried about where to set up, be worried about chairs and flat surfaces--fantastically liberating!
4) Battery Life: A full day of use and half battery power was left. Not as good as some dedicated devices but a zillion times better than a laptop that only gets about 2 hours before needing a recharge. Definitely on the good end!
5) Bluetooth: Device is capable, but feature is not (yet) capitalized on.
