One thing that autistic kids can have trouble with is something you probably do every day without thinking - varying your voice as you speak to help get your message across. You change the pitch, volume, speed and rhythm of your speech - making your voice go up when asking a question, using inflections for sarcasm or stressing words to add emphasis - to ensure that your intended meaning is clear to the person that you're talking to.
These areas of speech are called prosody, and autistic kids can struggle with it - talking too loudly, using a monotone voice or asking questions in a flat tone - and as a result are often mistaken for being disinterested, unfeeling or lacking a sense of humour.
So why is it hard for them, and how can you help to prevent these misunderstandings?
There’s a bunch of different theories bouncing around about why autistic kids can have difficulty varying their voice when they speak:
They don’t hear a difference
Since they sometimes have difficulty distinguishing between different tones in music, some researchers have suggested that this is also true for speech sounds - the monotone voice being the result of repeating speech in the way that they hear it. But you only have to listen to an echolalic kid to know that this can’t be quite right - they can be excellent mimics, nailing the accent, inflection and rhythm of someone else’s speech.
They can’t produce a difference
Some autistic adults have described being very surprised to learn that they talk in a monotone - their voice doesn’t sound that way to them. So it could be that there’s some kind of miscommunication between the brain centres that control reception and production of speech.
They can be literal
A kid who has difficulty seeing anything other than the literal meaning of a word or phrase wouldn’t have any reason to change the way he talks to convey meaning - there’s only one literal meaning so it’s always clear what he meant.
They’re hypersensitive
If you’re a kid who finds sensory input overwhelming (particularly sound), you might choose to talk in a tone which sounds most pleasant to you. There’s some support for this idea in the fact that autistic adults sometimes report that it's difficult to listen to speakers with very animated voices (but that may have more to do with recognising and labelling emotions). My son Attie and I both have incredibly sensitive hearing (to the point of pain), and neither of us speak with a monotone (although Attie does have a problem regulating his volume). Max on the other hand is hyposensitive and he's the monotone talker in the family.
HOW TO HELP
So how can you help prevent the kind of misunderstandings that come from prosody issues?
- Teach them explicit rules about speech inflections, like ‘when we ask a question our voice goes up at the end’
- Don’t expect them to hear their own voice the way you do - they may not realise they’re speaking in a monotone, so advice like ‘say it like you mean it’ is pointless
- Explain that words and phrases can have more than one meaning, and that others might not automatically know which meaning you’re using (so making your voice change can show other people what you want the word to mean)
- Show how stressing different words in a sentence can change the meaning:
"I'm not driving you to school" - someone else will be
"I'm not driving you to school" - you'll be getting to school some other way
"I'm not driving you to school" - you'll be driving somewhere else
- They might not be able to monitor their own volume, so find a gentle way to let them know when they’re being too loud (a tap on the shoulder, a flashcard) - don’t get angry or yell ‘be quiet’ (it’ll only work for a second anyway)
- Listen to what they’re saying rather than the way in which they’re saying it to help them feel understood (e.g. don't tell them that their apology doesn't sound sincere)
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