Autists and immitation (and a theory about LFA)

[Aspie_rin]

I've found an intersesting article about autistic children tending to immitate efficiently and NT children tending to immitate socially: Autistic Kids Tend to Imitate ‘Efficiently,’ Not ‘Socially’ | Psych Central News

So, autistic children don't immitate people if they don't see the point of it. I'm wondering if that's why many LFAs don't learn to communicate in complex ways for a long time, or learn to go to the bathroom, etc.

After all, LFA usually don't end up having a low IQ score once you can test them accurately, so it's not because of lower intelligence. Children, and especially babies, are not smart enough to understand the purpose of many behaviors, and will only realise it once they do it by immitating others.

 

[Ylva]

You can understand a language from just listening to it, it would take a few weeks if you immersed yourself. To understand. To learn to speak it, you'd have to try speaking. And it might not be one hundred percent obvious how it's done, or why it's done.

Surely, a child who cares about nothing but learning to be like other people would invest a lot of energy in that. However, speaking is boring, repetition is dull, and practicing for the sake of practicing is worse than both. I read an article once about a man (who wrote it) who thought his nonverbal autistic son was unable, until the kid started pacing Disney films (quoting the lines on top of the actors saying them). That's what was interesting to that kid, not the in-your-face, sing-song, show-my-friends-how-good-you-can-speak-while-we-all-sit-here-making-unintelligible-cooing-noises way of learning to speak.

But as an autistic girl I had no recourse but to learn to copy others socially, so who am I to speak.

 

[toothless]

i am LFA and to me,the world is very different to how NTs or even aspies experience,all people are the same to me,they are a generic shape,a lump of flesh,they disintegrate into the background when im looking around,i dont process them.
if they talk to me,it takes me a while to process them and react;and to convert my thinking into useable language so it looks like im ignoring but my brain is working at a million times a minute to try and keep up with them.
from all the researching of people [in general] ive done,it seems i have very different visual perception and i see my surroundings in colours and lines that merge together to make shapes,i prefer to touch and bite things to make sense of what they are than relie on my eyes,they arent perfect shapes that i see so in effect im visually impaired by my perception despite having technically perfect eyes/eye sight.

as for being tested acurately and LFAs showing theres no intellectual disability anymore,i think we have different intelligences but i dont think we dont lack intellectual disability,this is why our functioning is so poor, and for example,there is the UK definition of LFA-which is an autistic who has intellectual disability,this goes on to flavour how their autism presents.
i was first tested accurately about 5? years ago when i got sectioned [US-this means you get locked up under the opinion of three health professionals] in a specialist intellectual disability hospital and for four months i was assessed in every aspect of my life and impairments and functioning and behaviors plus as well as having the standard WAIS test.
the result was,they were able to reduce the severe learning [intellectual] disability label to 'mild' and i was happy with that although to be fair im a lot more severe than people with mild intellectual disability that i know, eg i cant write,i cant add up at all,i cant do basic functioning skills at all without constant physical and verbal support as well as the use of PECS charts and so forth,but im not arguing,i just think im closer to moderate ID and its apparently written in my social services care plan that i have moderate ID,the specialist hospital who tested me while i was locked up did use my blog and some forum posts of mine without my permission as part of their testing [which scared me and made me even more paranoid] and they werent the best things to base testing on as i use a e-dictionary and e-thesaurus to compose my posts.

 

[Ylva]

My favorite teachers are those who take full responsibility for teaching. Granted, I've never had such a teacher myself, but they do exist – Michel Thomas and Marva Collins, for instance. As far as they are concerned, teaching is the responsibility of the teacher, instead of learning being the responsibility of the student. If the teacher does his/her job, then the student is learning; if the student isn't learning, he/she is not doing their job.

And they produce results, too. She teaches eight-year-olds to read Shakespeare; he can teach anyone the basics of a language in nine hours.

All this to say: I don't think it's our fault when we don't learn. Not as children. As adults we already lag too far behind.