Semiverbal Communication

lavender-sprinkles:

I think we don’t talk about semiverbal communication enough in the autistic community. We all know nonverbal is not speaking in words or speaking only a VERY small amount of words with significant struggle and pain. Semiverbal, though, has a much broader definition, and we underestimate the value of using this word to describe the way we talk with our mouth parts.

Just because we can still sound out vowels and consonants in such a way to form a word does not mean we are communicating properly and effectively. So many times I’ve had people tell me I can speak “just fine” because they can hear what I am saying and then there ends up a misunderstanding of some sort because they did not understand that I was not speaking just “fine”.

Semiverbal could mean…

• Speaking and expressing thoughts through scripts like movie quotes, commercial jingles, bits of songs, and things you hear in your everyday life.
• Speaking a full sentence but replacing words with certain sounds or bodily motions so that there are pauses in the sentence where you interject the replacement.
• Speaking words out of order consistently so that the correct meaning can still be interpreted, but only after taking a moment to think about it and correcting the order.
• Shortening full sentences or phrases to a more shortened form such as “I love you” to “Love” or “I want water please.” to “Water”.
• Talking coherently in some areas of speech and then other parts it turning out garbled or incorrect.
• Sentences in your head not matching up with the words that come out of your mouth so that people misinterpret what you mean (this is a big issue for me personally, and I often have to get people to say back to me what I say so I can catch any mistakes because I don’t realize that they happen when the words come out of my mouth).
• Starting out saying something and then forgetting a word so you have to start the sentence over  and rework it to fit in a similar word so your sentence still makes sense. Saying something but one word was missing so you have to say it again with the word inserted.
• Thinking the right word in your head, but only wrong words coming out of your mouth.
• Making up words to mean things even if you know the correct word for what you mean because the made-up word sounds more right to you (this doesn’t count mash-up words, just words that are completely made up).

I really believe if people understood the multiple ways someone can be semiverbal we may be able to avoid a lot more misunderstandings and frustrations when autistics speak and recognize even if we can talk, we are still struggling to communicate.

I think we should use the word semiverbal more because it doesn’t just mean can speak, but only a little bit, it encompasses a lot of types of difficulties autistics have when speaking.

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Day 20 of Autism Acceptance Month 2018

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