#speech issues

[manyminded]

here’s to disabled people who can’t speak/struggle to speak. wether it be a physical thing, mental thing, or both, it’s okay. you’re not any less a person for it.

[spooksforsammy]

Can make fun of me way talk all want

Still going talk wrong. Is still messed up. Will skip words. Stutter. Talk extremely fast. Say things don’t mean.

Can mock all want. Say need fix how speak, Is all wrong.

How I speak is how I speak. I have speech impairments and am semiverbal. No matter how much bully or make fun of or mock, my speech won’t get better because you want it to

Thank you <3

[connor-101]

I love my speech therapist a lot, we stim together a lot when we both get excited, she's so much fun to talk with!

She helps me out a lot with self advocacy as well, we're working on finding ways for me to let people know about my disabilities and stand up for myself when people don't want to listen!

She'll gladly listen to me infodump without getting annoyed. If I say a word wrong she just quickly helps me correct it before letting me continue.

She doesn't get mad at me when I continuously mess up a word, that's a really big deal to me!

She doesn't get mad at me when I don't understand sarcasm or a joke, instead she explains it to me and tells me the context that people may use said joke in.

She actually takes the time to understand how I express my emotions and my sense of humor!

Even though she doesn't have to, she used her own personal experiences to help explain social situations to me/how to react to said situations.

She's been actively trying to help me get a proper on-paper autism diagnosis, since I still don't have one despite being told by multiple professionals that I do have the 'tism.

When I ask her to watch a video related to my special interest, she'll actually watch it! Most people won't even look at any videos that I ask them to watch! It might take her a few days because she's busy, but she will always watch them 100% of the way through!

[the-missann]

I've never had the chance to share this so ig I'll do it here.

So, I have a speech impediment. Yay.

Specifically a stutter and I've suffered bullying centered around my stuttering for years on end. (For some reason it was always by girls. Guys used to think my stutter was cute for some reason it's not btw).

My sutter is the prolongation of words and the block

I.e How areeeee you and I'm fin____

I wanted to share this for anyone else who's living with a stutter. I've noticed a few things.

I actually only stutter on vowels (lovely that every word has a vowel in it huh?)

I pretty much stop breathing when I talk (it's like my brain can only focus on one thing at a time)

Reading does not increase or decrease my stuttering.

I sometimes add extra words or pronounce words differently to avoid stuttering.

My stutter decreases dramatically when speaking to people who don't cut me off.

Now, I'll go through and explain them to help anyone who may have similar issues.

For 1, I noticed around four years ago that I actually only stutter on words that have a vowel sound. I sat down with myself and talked for a bit and found that every word I stuttered on, it was at the vowel sound.

Shockingly, even words that begin with a vowel sound I stutter over, I'll give details on that later.

So, the best way I've learn to handle this is to stop when I know a word has a vowel and I stutter on that word, so I'll say something like:

Everything is all ready done.

Separating them into two words seems to prevent me from stuttering.

2 might also just be my anxiety, but for the sake of this post, let's say it's not. I noticed I'm usually out of breath when I talk. I do talk fast, but I mean like I just ran a marathon out of breath from just saying a simple sentense.

The best way I can describe it is like when you're singing a song. You try and sing the full line as the singer does, but most of us haven't trained our lungs so we end up breathless by the end of it.

I still do this, but it's gotten better as I've learned to breathe from my diaphragm when I talk instead of my chest.

3 I'm really saying for anyone trying to help someone with a stutter. This does not help someone to calm their stutter. As a kid, my parents sat me down and assumed if I read aloud I would learn not to stutter, but it makes no difference.

My advice is to just be patient. That person knows they stutter, let them take their time and they'll eventually get out what they need to say. You're in no rush to hear what they say, so just let tham go at their own pace.

One last thing about this. DO NOT try and finish a sentence for them. It's bad enough we have a stutter, but if someone tries to fill in the sentence for us, our self esteem goes 📉📉.

For 4 (lol) this is a thing I developed and it works pretty well. This is the detail I was going to get into. So, sometimes I stutter over the word it, no Pennywise.

So, to stop that from happening since it is used a lot, I started saying "I T is like." Now, I don't say that in public, but I do with my family and the word is simple enough that no one is thinking too hard on what I spelled out.

But this is why I usually don't refer to things by their proper name (so if anyone here ever becomes my real friend, please know I'm not saying things wrong, I'll just stutter otherwise).

Lastly, 5. I would assume this is the same for everyone regardless if they have a stutter or not. When someone is cutting you off, it makes you rush your words, cut your words off, and stutter. So it gets worse for someone with a stutter.

I have very rarely encountered people who didn't try and cut me off because I paused to take a breath or held out a word. It's true that the anticipation of someone cutting you off sometimes makes you stutter.

I have my stutter under control a lot now, but it did take me a while to get to this point. So, for anyone out there who has a stutter, try and find out what makes your stutter tick and go from there to find ways around it.

This has been a PSA about stuttering, thank you for reading 🍂

Sorry, but last thing, since I'm a writwblr, I wanted to add how to properly write a character with a stutter.

We know t-the (repeating sound) stutter is a real one, but it's normally used for someone who's simply nervous. Someone who actually stutters would stutter at any point in time and sometimes in different ways (eg me having two versions of a stutter).

Also, know where your character's stutter comes from. Mines happens to be hereditary and environmental as I frequently get cut off and thus rush my words to get them out faster. It's also just kind of the way I am since I'm very fast paced and have a hard time "taking things slow"

It's also good to detail a tick or habit your stuttering character may have, like they stop talking and shake their head when pausing their stutter.

Oh, and it's true, cursing eliminates stuttering. There needs to be some testing done on that.

[clownpuppysposts]

What is the difference between speech difficulties from Autism and speech difficulties from Dyspraxia?

(Yes I could google this but I probably wouldn't understand the answer)

[system-of-a-feather]

Curious, other people who had speech therapy, how long were you in speech therapy and are you autistic, have adhd, have language processing disorder etc?

I'm mostly curious because in hindsight, we should have noticed our system has significant speaking and speech issues considering us being we were in speech from pre-k to 6th grade - so about 8 years.. which is almost the same amount of time we've been in therapy for everything else

Responses are appreciated ^^

[matiasthecamilion]

Idk remember when but once I read a fic human au of good omens and explained that Crowley's hissing was due to speech issues.

That make me inexplicable happy bc I have little problems to communicate my thoughts and feeling and when I' nervous I stutter a little

[chaos-kittens]

How do you manage being unable to socialize and being horribly lonely at the same time?

How do you try to go make friends when you don’t even know how to speak?

[po-pulari-tics]

I communicate however I can, using whatever words/gestures/etc. I can, even if it is incongruous. It is a good example of fluctuating disability.

[auticrat]

I feel like, as an autistic person who was in extensive speech therapy, you sometimes talk in a some sort of sub-language with others despite your best efforts.

I understand almost everything what a person says, but when I try to talk the person tells me I talk half-gibberish, even though I literally talk in the same language and manners as them, and I need to repeat myself couple of times for them to understand me. It really started to drag on when I hit 12-14 years old because a bunch of mental problems had popped up, including catatonic schizophrenia.

It may be because my catatonia likes to slowdown my brain, or of my "organic brain damage" I was diagnosed with since childhood, or the autism itself; no one fucking knows!

The moral of this story is: no matter how much you try, you will still talk like an alien in one way or another due to your inherent characteristics in speech apparatus.

[shiutsu]

i feel like instead of forcing people,who have some sort of problem to act like the uneffected rest,mfs should just deal with it and stfu about their nonsense.

[the-stray-pup]

Don’t make me repeat myself >>>>> did I stutter?

[angryatitall]

I am 23, I try to look like a 'normal adult'..i meet up with people for a meeting and it goes wrong right away.

They always see someone who needs help, who they need to talk to like I'm a child.

I try to talk with them, but I can't. They don't understand me so they just laugh a bit. I am tired.

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[silly-and-unserious]

Do any other autistics feel a strange sense of discomfort, or feel like they are slightly dissociating when they speak with mouthwords?

For some reason, very frequently lately, if I speak outloud it's like I don't recognize my voice or something and it makes me like feel weird like thinking things like "is that my voice" "am I awake or asleep" "I'm a real person?" Etc.

Idk if I'm just experiencing a burnout of sorts or what but it's been a lot more difficult to use mouth words and form verbal sentences and remember words etc.

[system-of-a-feather]

Honestly, I think people who don't have language issues / speech issues kinda assume that it is just learning words or making sentences that are the issue - and yeah! That can be part of it

But a lot of the time its a lot more complex than that because language is a lot more complex than that - it's just something that a lot of people with typically-developing language and speech skills take for granted because it comes naturally to them

I was thinking about a response I was trying to say to my fiance as a joke (verbally where we struggle a lot more than written) and had a very kind of funny in-hindsight language "glitch". I was going to use it as an example but I couldn't remember the exact contact and phrasing that made it made sense.

Everything from here is how my brain works and may not apply to all people with language / speech issues.

But often when speaking certain words cluster together into conceptual groupings and they together fall into general functions in sentence structure (adjective) (noun) or (action) (noun) or (pronoun) (noun) and they generate a specific concept and idea together that isn't always the same as when translated individually. Additionally, in my experience, chunks of phrases and semantically similar words (ie words that tend to frequently be used together) are easier to draw upon and tend to be pulled into my awareness / "speaking pool" better than individual words.

So "bite you" "bite me" and "bite that" are all actions of biting something in specific and they tend to register in a chunk and operate much like an independent word probably does to an individual without language / speech issues (I am assuming based on how my written language skills are because I usually have little impact on my writing ability)

Taking that into consideration of that with the fact that sometimes it is just hard to find the phrases I'm looking for and thus a common cheat sheet to getting around that is to use the phrasing of the other person if their words were 'close enough' to what I wanted to say, there are certain moments where something entirely different than what was MEANT to be said is actually spoken.

Again, I don't remember the exact details to make it make sense as an example with just the script but him and I were joking around. He made a joke that it is "his job to bite me" which is a play jab cause we bite him 5x more than the other way around. So I wanted to reply "Bitch no, it's MY job to bite YOU" - but I had issues pulling the words together

To say that I needed to state the subject, the action, and any necessary modifiers.

Modifier: "No" (disagreeing)

Subject: "Your job" "(unlabeled concept of me / mine / I)"

Action: "Bite me" (<-stolen from his original phrasing, "me" is taken because brain said I was missing a word that represents the concept of myself in relation to the sentence and "me" is one of those words that fills that + its conveniently already attached to another word)

So my brain put it together "No your job is to bite me"

Which when put next to what I was TRYING to say, is the exact opposite. And so unreliable speech moment which had us both laugh a bit because I just responded to him saying that it was his job to bite me with "no your job is to bite me" which is silly

And honestly unreliable speech takes more forms than this cause theres a lot of different types of unreliable speech errors and what not, but I did kind of want to breakdown one of them for people since I have the written language skills to do so.