ASD and toki pona

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jan Ote
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ASD and toki pona

Post by jan Ote »

Begining at: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1365&p=7107#p7098
jan Mato wrote:If I have a mental model of what is going on in your head, you can speak word soup to me (just jumble everything up) and I'll be able to use paralinguistic information to pull out from your message what you really meant to say.
But the problem is opposite: a person with ASD doesn't have a mental model of your mind, all he has is what you said. Now he has to find what you meant by your words. Your sentences are grammatically all right, no parsing errors, they are logical, so why should he suppose that your "can you tell me what time is it now?" is not a question, a request for information about his abilities or will? It is a question about his capabilities. So the logical answer is: "Yes, I can tell you". Oh, wait! in 99.99% of cases you just mean "tell me what time is it". But why don't you tell THIS? Why do you ask him a question if he can tell you the time? The problem is: he understands what you said very well. He just don't grok your social code which changes the meaning. Clear, explicit language, without codes, metaphores and so on is very important when you want to be understood by him.
jan Mato wrote:More likely my mental model of an Autistic person is that they lack a mental model of whats going on in other peoples head, and you are seeing it as a lingusitic phenomena-- i.e. they are misunderstanding the sentence.
Well, persons with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have problems with social interactions and communication. It doesn't mean that the source of autism is lack of language understanding (as in: understanding a programming language), but it does mean that language communication is part of the problem. To quote Wikipedia:
Autism forms the core of the autism spectrum disorders. Asperger syndrome is closest to autism in signs and likely causes; unlike autism, people with Asperger syndrome have no significant delay in language development.
So in the case of Asperger syndrome they shouldn't have any problems with oral communication?
Although individuals with Asperger syndrome acquire language skills without significant general delay [...]Abnormalities include [...] literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance [...] Children with AS may have an unusually sophisticated vocabulary at a young age and have been colloquially called "little professors", but have difficulty understanding figurative language and tend to use language literally. Children with AS appear to have particular weaknesses in areas of nonliteral language that include humor, irony, and teasing.
For persons with ASD it's difficult to read nonverbal signals, so the key in communication is spoken (written) language. But even here, in a language, they are in trouble.
People with Asperger’s syndrome think differently than other people and we lack social skills and communication skills. We are pretty much "blind" to non-verbal communication like body language, facial expressions and tone of voice, we tend to take things literally and struggle to understand jokes, sarcasm, metaphors and such and we cannot pick up social cues on our own.
See for example:
http://life-with-aspergers.blogspot.com ... rally.html
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/asp ... -aspergers
That is why an important part of standard treatment is training of pragmatic language skills.

Idioms, metaphors, rhetorical questions, politeness code, and all that stuff in a language ARE a problem for persons with ASD. Using toki pona greatly reduces this problem. "o pana e ilo ni tawa mi" has literal meaning and is neutral, not considered rude, since there is no special politeness code in toki pona. Idioms almost don't exist. Sure, there are ambiguities in toki pona, but both sides have the same problem with them. Toki pona pushes users to express their thoughts in a simple way, it's so basic, that it forces us to use a rule: what is said is what is meant. If non-ASD and ASD person are using toki pona, chances for understanding are more equal than when they use any natural language with all its heavy culture dependent oddities.
janMato
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Re: ASD and toki pona

Post by janMato »

Re: what you said..
If that is what you said the first time, then I don't think we ever had a real disagreement. Darn. That makes it difficult to keep moving the debate forward.

Re: ASD and language
Language is still a red herring. Using my non-expert mental model of what ASD is (lacking a the ability to imagine what is going on in someone elses mind) then it's not just language that is a problem, someone could be passed out on the floor. An person with no ability to imagine whats going on in the other persons mind, may just think "He's decided to lay down" A person with a good sense of theory-of-mind, will think "He would never do this intentional, he is unlikely to do this accedentally, he knows he looks silly laying down on the floor and that would hurt his pride and standing in the community to look silly. Therefore, this guy has passed out drunk (because I know he is weak willed around liquor) or he's had a heart attack (because I know he's weak willed around bacon and lard)"

If the person on the floor had a chance to say something just before they passed out, toki pona would just add to the confusion. "I think I'm going to fall", "Suddenly I feel like I have no strength"
jan Mato wrote:Oh, wait! in 99.99% of cases you just mean "tell me what time is it". But why don't you tell THIS?
Because I know that you know quite a bit about whats going on in my head, so I have the luxury of being sloppy about my messages. I know that you probably don't think I'm a joker, insane, irrational-- so if I say something that is ambiguous and some of the possible meanings are funny, crazy or don't serve my goals as a individual, you'd discard those possible meanings and focus on the ones that do make sense.

Lojban would be the better language for speaking with an ASD person, not toki pona. At least Lojban has an explicit goal of reducing the number of possible meanings of a sentence.
[...] Children with AS may have an unusually sophisticated vocabulary at a young age and have been colloquially called "little professors", but have difficulty understanding figurative language and tend to use language literally.
Which makes perfect sense-- if you have no other clues, then the most superficial meaning of a multi-meaning sentence is the most likely one.
Idioms, metaphors, rhetorical questions, politeness code, and all that stuff in a language ARE a problem for persons with ASD.
I don't entirely diagreewith you here. But if a conlang is to be an innovative solution, then the answer is lojban, not toki pona, which just wallows in ambiguity that can only be resolved through theory-of-mind-- something that ASD people are suspected of being *incompetent* at.
Using toki pona greatly reduces this problem. "o pana e ilo ni tawa mi" has literal meaning and is neutral, not considered rude.
To an ASD person, everything is neutral. It's to the neuronormal that this is rude (unless this is a phrase repeated so often that it is washed out of it's literal meaning). This puts sentence puts you in the position of being able to give orders. So I think you think you can give me orders. I think it is rather presumptuous of you to put yourself in the one-up position. BUT, to even image the scenario of the last two sentences, you have to have a functioning theory-of-mind. So (depending on the cutlure) you can't use the grammatical imperative outside of life and death situations. Worse, it's 2nd order. You have to imagine what I think you'd think if I thought you were putting me in a one-down position. Neuronormal people do this efforlessly and we don't even notice it.

If it was a life and death situation, you (who are my equal), say, "GET OUT OF THE ROAD!" I think, hmm, that's rather presumptuos of him to order me around. Does he think he's my boss? No, he's actually a rather nice guy. I think, he must think I'm in grave danger, he would never put himself in a position where he'd say something that would make me think he was rude an presumptuous. Therefore, there must be another explanation-- namely, my life is in danger and immediate compliance is requried. Moreover, knowing that you are a nice guy and you are choosing a pragamatically risky strategy of a direct order (and risking offense), the situation must be dire.
since there is no special politeness code in toki pona. Idioms almost don't exist.
Ah, now something we can disagree on. It does exist, it's just ill-formed and in a state of transition.
Toki pona pushes users to express their thoughts in a simple way, it's so basic, that it forces us to use a rule: what is said is what is meant.
[/quote]
I don't buy this. One can speak grammatically valid toki pona that is just as indirect as natural languages.

(We're standing around at the movie theater)
impolite direct speech: mi mute o tawa sitelen pi jan Awisu pi ma nasa.
Sounds fine to ASD person, sounds rude to neuronormal.

indirect polite speech: mi la sitelen pi jan Awisu pi ma nasa li pona.

To a neuronomal, this is clearly indicating that one would like to see that movie, now and you'd like the person with you to go, but you don't want to put them in a one down position by acting like an order-giving boss. To the ASD, this is extraneous trivia, as if you'd said, "The color mauve is rather pretty on tea cups full of rooibos tea." An ASD person will perfectly memorize the fact that you like Alice in Wonderland and miss the point you just said you want very much to go see the movie.

Moreover, both of the sentences are rather simple-- if you diagrammed them, they'd be rather boring diagrams.
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Re: ASD and toki pona

Post by janKipo »

Well, Lojban has the same ambiguity problems as tp EXCEPT for syntactical ones. It also has more words, which helps a bit -- but not enough to justify the effort to learn them to get to a straightforward language. And I do hope tp will manage to avoid the circumlocutions of English (a vain hope, I know) and the need for politeness codes. i stay out of ASD discussions since I only know about them from television (Temple Grandin, Big Bang Theory) and introspection >|8)}
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jan Josan
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Re: ASD and toki pona

Post by jan Josan »

I don't know if this has been discussed in any papers etc. but I wonder: when it comes to two people with ASD communicating, is there a common understanding that makes it easier for them to communicate with each other, or are there other factors involved (low frustration tolerance etc.) that makes intra-communication with ASD even more challenging? The answer to this question might shade my opinion of what use toki pona could have in ASD therapy.
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Re: ASD and toki pona

Post by janMato »

jan Josan wrote:I don't know if this has been discussed in any papers etc. but I wonder: when it comes to two people with ASD communicating, is there a common understanding that makes it easier for them to communicate with each other, or are there other factors involved (low frustration tolerance etc.) that makes intra-communication with ASD even more challenging? The answer to this question might shade my opinion of what use toki pona could have in ASD therapy.
Dunno. This link http://www.autism-pdd.net/checklist.html
says that an autistic child will particular like formulaic speech--all their behaviors are formulaic--(They probably would be very strict at applying "thank and goodbye", but miss it's social meaning) and "language as used in social communication" is specifically singled out.

I'd predict a pair of people with ASD, would ignore each other and just not talk much. This article supports that: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/story? ... 013&page=1
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