Free Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin

circle. Plastic letters that can be felt are often useful for teaching words. The more protected these children are from distracting sights and sounds, the more likely it is that their dysfunctional nervous system will be able to perceive speech accurately To help them hear better, teachers must protect them from visual stimuli that will cause sensory overload. They may hear best in a quiet, dimly illuminated room that is free of fluorescent lights and bright wall decorations. Sometimes hearing is enhanced if the teacher whispers or sings softly. Teachers need to speak slowly to accommodate a nervous system that processes information slowly. And sudden movements that will cause sensory confusion should also be avoided.
    Children who are echolalic—who repeat what they hear— may be at a midpoint on the sensory processing continuum. Enough recognizable speech gets through for them to be able to repeat the words. Dr. Doris Allen, at the Albert Einstein Hospital in New York, emphasizes that echolalia should not be discouraged, so as not to inhibit speech. The child repeats what has been said to verify that he heard it correctly. Research by Laura Berk, at Illinois State University, has shown that normal children talk to themselves to help them control their behavior and learn new skills. Since autism is caused by immature brain development, it is likely that echolalia and self-talking, which occur in older autistic children, are the result of immature speech patterns.
    Unlike normal children, who naturally connect language to the things in their lives at a remarkable rate, autistic children have to learn that objects have names. They have to learn that words communicate. All autistic children have problems with long strings of verbal information. Even very high-functioning people have difficulty following verbal instructions and find it easier to follow written instructions, since they are unable to remember the sequence of the information. My college math teacher once commented that I took excessive notes. He told me that I should pay attention and understand the concept. The problem was that it was impossible for me to remember the sequence of the problems without the notes. I learned to read with phonics and sounding out words, because I was able to understand speech by age three. Children with more severe auditory processing problems often learn to read before they can speak. They learn best if a written word is paired with an object, because many of them have very poor comprehension of spoken words.
    As an adult my method for learning a foreign language may be similar to how a more severely impaired autistic child learns to understand language. I cannot pick words out of a conversation in a foreign language until I have seen them written first.
    Two basic patterns of autistic symptoms can help identify which children will respond well to intensive, gently intrusive teaching methods, and which will not. The first kind of child may appear deaf at age two, but by age three he or she can understand speech. I was this kind. When adults spoke directly to me, I could understand them, but when they talked among themselves, it sounded like gibberish. The second kind of child appears to develop normally until one and a half or two and then loses speech. As the syndrome progresses, the ability to understand speech deteriorates and autistic symptoms worsen. A child that has been affectionate withdraws into autism as his sensory system becomes more and more scrambled. Eventually he may lose awareness of his surroundings, because his brain is not able to process and understand sights and sounds around him. There are also children who are mixtures of the two kinds of autism.
    Children of the first kind will respond well to intensive, structured educational programs that pull them out of the autistic world, because their sensory systems provide a more or less accurate representation of things around them. There may be problems with sound