Friday 21 August 2015

An idea: linguistic analysis of autistic speech

There was just a documentary on TV about autism, it was really interesting and it had this kid in it who spoke "gibberish". That got me thinking. Is it really gibberish? Has anyone ever analysed the speech of autists linguistically? What if there exists an universal autistic language? I mean, I know it's a pretty ridiculous claim and I'm not saying that's how it is, but there could be a one in a billion chance that it is exactly that. The reason I even consider it is that when I was a kid, I behaved a lot like how autists behave, but was never diagnosed with autism or any related conditions (probably mainly because it all boiled down to that it had to be a mental illness of some kind because I had hallucinations and shit to go with it all), and I've always had a feeling that there's a language that some people just naturally have a grasp of even if it's difficult to understand even your own words in it. It's hard to explain but, like, consider the fact that words exist without meaning and meaning exists without words, so in the context of autism it could make sense to assume that there is meaning in the "meaningless" words that some autists speak, but there hasn't been a translation of the language. I know it's quite a leap of logic, but still... it would be interesting if somebody dug into it. I wish I could do it, but since I'm just a nobody... well, you know, I can't.