Published on 12, July, 2020
I grew up in a fairly rough part of Glasgow and went to school with people with very thick working class Glaswegian accents, but everyone always described me as "posh". I even remember a local shopkeeper asking my mum where I was from once. I never understood how I ended up with a different accent. But it occurred to me recently that I have three cousins who are siblings and two of them have very rough accents but one sounds an awful lot like me. You wouldn't believe she was related to her siblings.
Is this an autistic thing? Or is my accent just a freak of nature?
Here is a link to the thread I created:
https://community.autism.org.uk/f/adults-on-the-autistic-spectrum/34017/words-language-as-an-autistic-person/325716#325716
and here is the section from Tony Attwood's book I quoted from:
Hans Asperger eloquently described an unusual profile of language abilities that
included problems with conversation skills, the ‘melody’ or flow of speech, and an
unusual developmental history for language such as the early or late development of
speech. He also described a tendency for some young children to talk like an adult with
an advanced vocabulary and to use quite complex sentences.
The child may develop an impressive vocabulary that includes technical
terms (often related to a special interest) and expressions more often associated with the
speech of an adult than a child. The child can sometimes speak like a ‘little professor’
and entrance someone with a well-practised monologue on a favourite topic. However,
when this characteristic occurs in an adolescent it can be a contributory factor for social
exclusion.
The child’s articulation can be age appropriate but can be unusual in being almost
over-precise. The word may be pronounced as it is written rather than spoken: the child
learned language more by reading than from listening. There may be stress on specific
syllables that changes the expected pronunciation. I have observed that for some young
children with Asperger’s syndrome, the development of language appears to rely less on
conversation with family and peers and more on what is absorbed from television
programmes and films. Often the young child with Asperger’s syndrome pronounces the
word with the accent of the person whom he or she heard first say the word.
Thisexplains the tendency for some young children with Asperger’s syndrome in the United
Kingdom and Australia to speak with an American accent. Their vocabulary and pro-
nunciation of words was developed by watching television rather than talking to people
and especially by watching cartoons and films that use American actors and voices. This
characteristic can be quite conspicuous when other family members have the local
accent, but the child with Asperger’s syndrome talks as though he or she is a foreigner
Thanks for sharing these.