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: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.
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: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.
So in the case of Asperger syndrome they shouldn't have any problems with oral communication?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.
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.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.
See for example: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.
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.