Speech

If you listen to autistic people speaking you will notice they usually speak in a serious, monotonous voice. When I talk I try to inject some variety into the tone of my speech, it doesn’t always work, but I try. There is a similar difference between NT men and NT women. An NT woman’s speech is much more intonated than an NT man’s speech. If I were a man I would feel more comfortable speaking in my serious, monotonous voice; but I’m a woman, and people have expectations of me based on my gender. I think this is why my speech is not so stereotypical of an autistic person (most autistic people are male). I try hard to add colour to my speech, I probably sound a bit strange, but that’s better than sounding boring.

Another thing I do when I speak is pause a lot, at strange moments. I’m not doing this to create emphasis on particular words, or because I’m thinking hard about what I want to say because it’s so important. I do this because I’ve come to a word that I need to think about in order to pronounce. If I’m unsure how a word should sound I will repeat it in my head a couple of times before saying it. This isn’t just with words that have lots of syllables. If I’m tired or under stress simpler words can also cause me trouble. Sometimes it’s comes down to a lack of confidence; I think I‘m going to go wrong when I‘m not, so I pause, bracing myself for the next phrase.

Often while I’m pausing and thinking, there’s a bit of lip smacking or lip chewing going on. This is just a bit of limbering up. I’m reassuring myself my lips are there and working okay. My lips you see are a bit of hazy area; I sometimes forget where they are(and spill my drinks down myself), and they feel very strange, dead almost. I suppose I don’t know where they are because I can’t feel them. I think that’s why I touch my lips a lot and why I chew on them, just to create a sensation.

I think it’s a muscular thing. When I say a difficult word, for example ’pronunciation’, the movement I have to make with my lips feels odd; as if I’m doing it for the first time and the muscles in my lips aren’t used to the movement. It’s feels a bit like when you’ve overworked a muscle, you try to do something else and it doesn’t want to cooperate. It’s a bit like that (minus the shaking and tiredness).

If I’m not concentrating on my speech while I’m talking then my words will come out a bit slurred, and I’ll miss the beginnings or the endings off words. Sometimes I won’t finish a sentence but leave the listener to complete it themselves, to save myself the work of pronouncing the missing words. This sounds like extreme laziness but this is because you haven’t experienced the mental effort required for me to enunciate my words correctly.

I have to concentrate on each word to make the correct noises come out. Of course if I’m concentrating on making my lips move then that’s less time I have to concentrate on what it is I’m trying to say. I would have to have prepared it in advance, which you can’t do if your having a conversation with someone.

I can’t copy accents either. This isn’t a major obstacle in my life but it does mean I’ll never be very good at foreign languages. I’ve always been in awe of anyone who has mastered a foreign language. I did French and German for GCSE, but they were hard work and I knew I’d be rubbish at them if I tried doing either at A ‘level’.

I learnt these languages by memorising phrases. Grammar is very tricky for me, and similarly are the rules that govern the pitch and tone of language. Grammar at least I can take a stab at, but pitch and tone are much more difficult, there’s no apparent logic. I had a boyfriend who could do a good welsh accent. One day he said ‘I’ve got a letter see, from my mother’; it was a line from a television show. For some reason this stuck in my head. My brain must have been having one of it’s non-autistic moments. But I remembered it and have never forgotten it since. I can’t say anything else in a welsh accent, just this line.

I have a twin sister who is very good at accents and she also had many boyfriends. From about the age of fifteen I don’t think she has ever been single. She went with boyfriends from various parts of the country. She had a boyfriend from Newcastle for a while, and for the time she was going out with him she also had a Newcastle accent. We used to joke that her accent would changed whenever she got a new boyfriend. I’ve noticed as well that her accent changes slightly when she changes jobs. People in groups often create little phrases and nuances to their speech which are peculiar to that group. It’s a way of bonding. My sister has very good social skills. Which is fortunate for her because she does a lot of stuff that upsets people, but she always seems to manage to smooth things over.