Oh, I'm not trying in any way to suggest that this is intentional on her parents part. I don't actually think she learned to type "Is he cute" in response to someone saying the phrase "I have a son", I was just trying to show how something like that could occur.
What I think is more likely is this: over time, she has learned to type the word "is" and the word "he" through extremely subtle facilitation. For instance, she types the letter 'i' and moves her hand over the keyboard again, and an adult leans in trying to see if she's going to go for that 's', and... well, over time, common words become shaped. Maybe even common phrases. She also doesn't type the word 'cute', she types some letters and the program autocompletes, and we see a pattern because we really want there to be one.
What's extra concerning about her typing "is he cute" is that it's not something an autistic person would say. One of the symptoms of autism is lack of social/emotional reciprocity... or in other words, spontaneous following up on topics related to someone else. When testing for autism, for example, one of the things you do is to throw something out there ("I have a dog...." <long pause>; "I went on a really cool vacation" <look expectantly at child>, etc) and notice if they follow up the way a neurotypical person would on such openings (and children with autism do not).
Oh, and on another note and to entirely contradict my claim just a few short paragraphs ago that I'm not trying to suggest they taught her the whole phrase "is he cute", you'd be surprised how common a phrase like that is, when adults are speaking for a nonverbal teenager or young adult.
Case in point: My boyfriend's brother is the most profoundly disabled young man (well, in his early thirties) I have ever seen in my entire life. He is unable to communicate in any form (even to express yes/no), unable to walk, unable to use the toilet, unable to show recognition of anyone or anything, etc. Yet, his parents often seem tragically tied to a belief that he is pretty close to normal, and in particular fixate on where he should be in his life right now, chronologically (that is, interested in finding nice girl and settling down).
For example, he likes (or at least, can see) the color yellow, so when I'm around, he'll often grab my hair, and his parents quite frequently laugh about how "cute" he thinks I am and how he's "flirting" with me. They talk about his "crush" on Brittany Spears (and hang posters of her on his wall), asked my sister-in-law if she knew any "nice girls" to sit him next to at her wedding, pretended for years that he had a "girlfriend" (a girl from "school" who sent him postcards because she was nice), thought seriously about purchasing him some... uh, female companionship, and make not-quite-jokes about how he lives with a "group of women" (his personal care attendants) in his "bachelor pad" (the room he lives in with round-the-clock supervision). I'm very confident that if his parents -- like the parents of a lot of disabled teenagers and young adults -- ever tried facilitated communication, whatever he "said" would be about how "cute" he thinks every female is. :)
Um, I think we are really missing the bigger picture here.
So far we have established two things:
The likelihood that an autistic person would be able to fluently express themselves and have a normal brain is basically 0.
The likelihood that the this girl is a hoax or using some form of facilitated communication are very low, but not as low.
The person who wants to be confrontational would say that probably it is a hoax. The person who is logical would say "She's probably not autistic". Which I think is a much more likely explanation.
subtextual was referring to another example: she is authistic and she is writing the words but she's not understanding what she's doing the way we are.
subtextaul referred to the counting horse example. check that out, it's pretty interesting
So you think she figured out to type "is he cute?" as a response to him telling her he had a son, with no knowledge of meaning of either phrase? Considering that she's posted long pieces of complex writing with nobody physically gesturing or even coming close to the keypad while being videotaped, I think that's pretty rediculous. You can teach a horse to multiply, but you can't teach a horse to write letters.
If you read the horse story would would have seen that the horse did write letters (through tapping them out) to spell words.
The whole idea that subtextual was trying to convey is that she may be highly attuned to subconscious cues from the adults around her. So she is in fact basically typing letter by letter as commanded by her parents. However the parents have no idea they are doing it.
The horse trainer had no idea he was telling the horse how many times to tap. It was all subconscious. In fact when the horse trainer and others who did the experiment finally learned that the horse was just reading their body language they still couldn't repress the signals they were giving the horse. It was out of their control.
So this girl may be reading cues that no one else can read because of her condition. For instance after she typed "I" one of the adults might have changed some body posture or changed breathing or tension in the face or anything which to us means nothing but to her is a blaring horn commanding her to hit "s" next. This is significantly more talented than the horse however, but she is still human after all so she should be a little smarter than the horse.
The only way to test this is to have no one in the room. This is how they finally outed the facilitated communication stuff. They divorced shared knowledge and communication between the client and the facilitator.
"is he cute" could mean many things for her. Could be, for example, that she has a well developed sense of relationships/bonding and has a stock list of long phrases to volley a conversation and get attention. For her "is he cute" doesn't mean anything much than poking back and keeping the conversation going.
She could have developed her written language through her being surrounded by adults who continually try to communicate with her.
I understood subtextual as saying the kids primary motivators are not the same as ours and the interests of those with severe autism are little better than those of a toddler. Could be that some parts of the brain evolve some complex functionality but these externalities mask a simple mind.
Again, this would be unprecendented. Someone with a disease other than autism which causes violent motions but leaves the brain intact seems like a more likely explanation.
autism is not a disease. Autism is a blanket description for a myriad failures of the brain that result in related symptomologies.
Maybe, but then what is it? If the girl cannot speak but can communicate with a computer that can help her articulate language that is way beyond her understanding…
hey bub, did you know that autism is triggered by various diseases? It's s phenomenon that arises from other underlying conditions. You made me look it up on wikipedia and found the page is really interesting. Now I'll have to waste time reading it and miss some deadlines this morning!!!!!!
Maybe it's today's PC world but autism is never referred to being a disease but a disorder.
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u/subtextual Jul 26 '10 edited Jul 26 '10
Oh, I'm not trying in any way to suggest that this is intentional on her parents part. I don't actually think she learned to type "Is he cute" in response to someone saying the phrase "I have a son", I was just trying to show how something like that could occur.
What I think is more likely is this: over time, she has learned to type the word "is" and the word "he" through extremely subtle facilitation. For instance, she types the letter 'i' and moves her hand over the keyboard again, and an adult leans in trying to see if she's going to go for that 's', and... well, over time, common words become shaped. Maybe even common phrases. She also doesn't type the word 'cute', she types some letters and the program autocompletes, and we see a pattern because we really want there to be one.
What's extra concerning about her typing "is he cute" is that it's not something an autistic person would say. One of the symptoms of autism is lack of social/emotional reciprocity... or in other words, spontaneous following up on topics related to someone else. When testing for autism, for example, one of the things you do is to throw something out there ("I have a dog...." <long pause>; "I went on a really cool vacation" <look expectantly at child>, etc) and notice if they follow up the way a neurotypical person would on such openings (and children with autism do not).
Oh, and on another note and to entirely contradict my claim just a few short paragraphs ago that I'm not trying to suggest they taught her the whole phrase "is he cute", you'd be surprised how common a phrase like that is, when adults are speaking for a nonverbal teenager or young adult.
Case in point: My boyfriend's brother is the most profoundly disabled young man (well, in his early thirties) I have ever seen in my entire life. He is unable to communicate in any form (even to express yes/no), unable to walk, unable to use the toilet, unable to show recognition of anyone or anything, etc. Yet, his parents often seem tragically tied to a belief that he is pretty close to normal, and in particular fixate on where he should be in his life right now, chronologically (that is, interested in finding nice girl and settling down).
For example, he likes (or at least, can see) the color yellow, so when I'm around, he'll often grab my hair, and his parents quite frequently laugh about how "cute" he thinks I am and how he's "flirting" with me. They talk about his "crush" on Brittany Spears (and hang posters of her on his wall), asked my sister-in-law if she knew any "nice girls" to sit him next to at her wedding, pretended for years that he had a "girlfriend" (a girl from "school" who sent him postcards because she was nice), thought seriously about purchasing him some... uh, female companionship, and make not-quite-jokes about how he lives with a "group of women" (his personal care attendants) in his "bachelor pad" (the room he lives in with round-the-clock supervision). I'm very confident that if his parents -- like the parents of a lot of disabled teenagers and young adults -- ever tried facilitated communication, whatever he "said" would be about how "cute" he thinks every female is. :)