The Middletown Centre for Autism Podcast
The Middletown Podcast features interviews with leading thinkers and practitioners across the autistic and autism community. Conversations are autism-affirming and neurodiversity-informed with a focus on the lived experience and knowledge of our community. Episodes highlight issues impacting autistic people and we share ideas for family members and school staff who are providing support.
The Middletown Centre for Autism Podcast
Understanding Autistic Communication with Gemma Williams
For a long time, our understanding of autistic communication was based on assumptions made by non-autistic researchers. In this podcast, we chat to autistic researcher, Gemma Williams about her neurodiversity-affirming approach to communication.
To find out more about Gemma’s book, visit: https://pavpub.com/health-and-social-care/health-autism/understanding-others-in-a-neurodiverse-world-a-radical-perspective-on-communication-and-shared-meaning?srsltid=AfmBOop9_uw9zqqjqGaWZ13uDPJvFbpM4h-iwQDJdNEip49dubFUbbCI
Welcome to the Middletown Podcast. I'm Kat Hughes, I'm a researcher at Middletown and I'm also autistic. In this episode I chat to researcher, linguist and author Gemma Williams about autistic communication. Gemma has a fascinating book called Understanding Others in a Neurodiverse World that looks at the shifting understanding of autistic communication. We talk about theories of autistic communication and how understanding communication can massively impact how we live. We also chat about Gemma's own experience as an autistic linguist. I found Gemma fascinating, not least because I studied linguistics for postgrad, but I think she has such a brilliant way of communicating about communicating. I hope you enjoy our chat Well, gemma. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. I'm delighted to have a chance to chat with you. I wanted to start with what appears like an easy question and a starter question, but I think it's actually a really complicated question. What exactly do we mean by communication?
Speaker 2:yeah, I feel like this is almost like a trick question because it's so difficult. Uh, that, yeah, I think you said that you've also studied linguistics, right, so there are so many different ways that you can, so many different definitions that you can give for communication. Um, I think, when you boil it down, the kind of simplest one is it's a transfer of information, and I would probably say a transfer of information between two cognizing beings, and by that I mean beings that have the ability to know stuff. So that includes humans, but also animals and also plants as well. Um, but you, you can also have communication between machines, so it, you can look at it in lots of different ways. Um, in, yeah, when thinking about human communication, you have, um, it's normally broken down into verbal communication, so meaning that's transmitted through or created by words, and non-verbal communication, so body language and gesture and things like that tone of voice. But it's really complicated it is, it's a.
Speaker 1:It's an awful question to start with, I apologize, and you can go in so many directions with it. So then, in terms of autistic communication, then, are there sort of assumptions that historically we've made?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think the traditional view of autistic people has been that we're impaired communicators, that you know. There have been a number of suggestions made for for why that might be. It's not something I agree with, just to say that out front. Um, yeah, this sort of view has been that autistic people either struggle with social communication or um don't have the ability to understand or sometimes even identify the fact that other people have different perspectives to them or different thoughts or feelings. And because the ability to appreciate another person's perspective is so essential in communication, that's it's sort of been assumed. Yeah, so one sort of faulty assumption is that autistic people can't understand the perspectives of others. And then the second one is you know, as a consequence, we we struggle with communication.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah and I think, yeah, I agree it. Yeah, and I think, yeah, I agree. It's something that I think a lot of us have been very much sort of rallying against, and lovely to have seen that sort of shift in in understanding. And so are there unique elements to autistic communication and interaction then.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, again, this is not difficult to answer answer, but it depends which way you look at it. So there's, there's been this rules of deficit-based view of autistic communication and from which has been dominant until really recently, and from that perspective, there's a kind of list of ways in which autistic people tend to communicate differently to non-autistic people. So that might um include things like um atypical prosody, which is, as I'm sure you know, it's the um ways to describe the kind of melody and the music in how we speak, um things like echolalia or echolalia, where um autistic people sometimes have a tendency to pick certain words or phrases and repeat them out of context, and often you see it in children. But well, it was historically, it was thought it was more in children. But I mean, I do it. I don't.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you do, but I you know these little, yeah, like earworms of, uh, little bits of I don't know like an ad, like I'll find myself walking around the kitchen and just singing a, a line from an advert that I heard on tv when I was a kid, on loop.
Speaker 1:I don't know why I'm doing this, but it makes me feel really good, yeah and if I watch anything Australian, I suddenly have an Australian at least a couple hours afterwards.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, actually that just reminds me when, um, when I was a kid, we went on holiday. I was really little and I made a friend it's probably one of my first friends and it was just another girl that I met in the playground. You know where we were staying, but she was from Wales and I came back with a Welsh accent for a few weeks and my parents were like what, what's happened? But I think, yeah, that. I mean, you see that you see that in um, all all types of communication, this idea of converging, where a person kind of migrates the way they speak and modulates it to fit in with other people. So it might be like with a more powerful group or someone you want to be close to, you might pick up mannerisms of how they speak and replicate it not intentionally, even um. So there's probably an element of that in echolalia.
Speaker 2:Um, you will say, one of the main things that traditionally was thought about autistic communication was pragmatic. It used to be called pragmatic impairments, but I'd rather think about it like pragmatic differences. Um, and that's that relates to how we interpret meaning in context. Um and it affects things like um, like it often can mean that some autistic people take things more literally or maybe have greater difficulty in like figurative language, like metaphors and things. I didn't think I take things literally, but my partner always finds it hilarious. He's also autistic, but finds it hilarious like he'll say something and I'll. He'll, kind of you know, say something metaphorically and I'll just go for the absolute literal interpretation.
Speaker 1:I don't even realize I'm doing it, but yeah yeah, metaphors are a funny one, because I was the same. I didn't think that I was confused by metaphors, but then I realized the amount of time it took me to translate a metaphor into what the person actually means. Yeah, very different to how non-autistic people approach metaphors and they don't have that sort of having to translate that I have. So, yeah, it's, and I guess that's a real literal interpretation of being confused by metaphors. Yeah, you're right yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So the other day, um, my sister, she loves Halloween and she had this kind of Halloween gathering and we sort of had snacks and stuff and she wanted to play this game where everyone takes it in turns to do something around the table, and she said we'll pass the hat around. And she meant it like the kind of authority hat, I guess, like the person that speaks. But she was wearing a massive witch's hat. So I was like, do we need the witch's hat? Why is the hat going around? And everyone was laughing at me.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it's that kind of thing, things that I've seen and often you hear anecdotally as well um is in um, what is it? People maybe take longer turns when they speak. So in um, in conversation it often goes back and forth and these little, each thing you say in linguistics is described as a you know a turn, um, and you have to see, autistic people will speak more at length. But what I've found, looking at sort of transcripts of autistic people talking together, is that it's really balanced. So one person will take a you know quite a long turn compared to neurotypical people, but then the conversational partner will sort of listen and then come in with another really long turn and it's just.
Speaker 1:It's still balanced, it's just different yeah, that's lovely, and then I suppose that kind of leads on, I think, really nicely to the idea of double the communication difficulties that do often happen between autistic and non-autistic people, that it's a two-way problem and that it's a kind of mismatch of understanding that runs in both directions.
Speaker 2:And it was put forward by a sociologist called Damian Milton, who's autistic himself, and it it was like it was to, as a counter to this idea that autistic people can't understand the perspectives of neurotypical people. So it's really shifted the emphasis on it's moved our understanding of these communication difficulties from being really deficit focused on autistic people to, oh, it's a shared responsibility. I don't know about you, but I feel like when I, when I started my PhD research, that was probably like 2017. It it was around, but it wasn't it. You'd hear it in the sort of autism discourse, but you wouldn't hear it outside. But now it feels like it's much more popularized and people know a lot more about it no, absolutely although, oh sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 1:I was gonna say I interviewed Damian Milton recently for the podcast and he was saying that only recently has there started to be a pushback in relation to double empathy and people sort of really challenging it and which I thought was really interesting because it I guess it's almost proof that it is popularized if there's starting to be that pushback yeah, I think, I think that's it, it's, it's.
Speaker 2:I find it really interesting the way that knowledge moves through society as well, like we're constantly updating how we understand things.
Speaker 2:But you know, you see, the see, sometimes research is done and then ideas come out of it, or concepts, and then they're in their own little bubble for a while and then they sort of trickle into society, like I saw you'd spoken to Fergus Murray about monotropism and again, that's something that was quite niche for a while, you know for all, for a really long time, from when it was first spoken about and and now it's really bloomed and which I think it's really.
Speaker 2:I think that's really positive because, coming back to the double empathy problem, if people go into interactions aware of the potential for the double empathy problem, you can try to mitigate it or just, or just even being aware of it, I think, lessens the impact. And I, yeah, I, I'm really interested in the kind of parallels between communication, cross neurotype communication, so between autistic and non-autistic people, and cross cultural communication. It's important to say that I'm not suggesting autism as a culture, I don't mean it like that. But when you get people from different language backgrounds using a shared language to communicate, like English, for example, often it's so successful. They might come from really different cultural backgrounds, language backgrounds, but they can really sort of meet in the middle and I, my sort of suspicion, is that there's something in there about the fact you're going into the communication knowing that you've got to make those extra efforts yeah, absolutely that.
Speaker 1:That's how I've sort of felt about it and sort of how I tend to kind of communicate about the idea of double empathy. If we and I to me I think it's almost the most fundamental thing if someone knows nothing else about autistic experience if they understand double empathy it can it's just the most perfect starting place because it kind of it both sides kind of have that opportunity to go okay, I understand my experience and that's all I potentially understand in this and let's work together to communicate and sort of cross that divide, which I think is just beautiful as much as I.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it is really beautiful and I think it's so. One of the things that I think is maybe a challenge to neurotypical people trying to enter into that way of thinking is it. The differences that autistic people experience are a lot more. I won't say invisible, but I'm aware like invisible disabilities has its own kind of connotations, but it's hard for anyone to think about somebody else being different and thinking differently, like different ways of you know, profoundly different ways of experiencing the world and sensory differences and reality is almost a little bit different. That's hard to imagine if you know that that's hard for anyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I wonder I suppose there's been such a significant lack of representation of autistic experience sort of, in the world, in the media, and I wonder, as that sort of slowly is increasing, will that make it a little bit easier? Because I think from a perspective. We consume so much non-autistic experience just with books that we read and tv shows we watch and you know whatever it might be. I wonder, will that make it a little bit easier if there's more representation and more conversations between people about what life is like?
Speaker 2:I hope so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd like to think it's going that way, yeah fingers crossed, and then if there's sort of a, an ease of communication, then potentially between autistic people. So so, within that neurotype, um, what is the, the basis of that?
Speaker 2:ease. Yeah, I think it's probably a few different things at play, um, so, on the one hand, you know there's there's often a kind of masking that has to happen when you're moving through a non-autistic neurotypical world, and I think off this it almost feels like a bit of a radar. You know, when you know, when you recognize another autistic person or you're in an autistic space which is rare, but you know there are events that are organized. Sometimes you have the privilege of being in a autistic dominant space and just that ability to be less guarded and communicate more freely. Um, I think that really that really helps. Um, that maybe there's something also about you know there's the possibility of having more in common, um, although autistic people are as varied as you know, everyone's different, so it may not be have obvious things in common, but it might just, you know, it could just be the shared experience of being a neuro minority and, you know, or having felt like an outsider, there's a lot of ways that you can sort of resonate with other autistic people.
Speaker 2:Um, and then there was a study um by Brett Heisman uh, I don't know if you've, if you've seen it and he was looking autistic sociality, he called it, um. So he recorded a group of I think it's about 30 autistic adults playing computer games together and then you know small groups, and analyzed the transcripts and looked at how they interacted and he noticed two different um characteristics of this autistic sociality and one of them was a more generous assumption of common ground. So that would look like someone taking a very sharp detour in the conversation, you know, going off on a tangent or just dropping in um like a random quotation from a film, without checking if the person knew that film, but just sort of freestyling. And um, it seemed like that happened a lot more and when that worked it, when when the kind of references were understood, there was a greater sense of rapport, that connection could be built a lot more quickly. And then if it wasn't understood it could be more disruptive.
Speaker 2:But the second thing he noticed was what was the second thing? Yeah, there was a lower requirement for coordination. So it seemed like autistic people were more tolerant of things not quite making sense. And I've thought about that and I wondered is that because maybe we're just used to things not quite making sense? And I've thought about that and I wanted is that because maybe we're just used to things not quite making sense. Yeah, we're surrounded by neurodifficult people yeah, yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1:I think it's a regular occurrence on our part, so we just go with it yeah, and maybe a bit more patient of it as well and I think it's something that because because within Middletown we work a lot with parents and with teachers and I think it's where people can be slightly confused, because I think when they hear about the concept of double empathy, it's almost as though they kind of go okay, right, well, we just have to give them an autistic friend, and sort of the assumption that if there's, you know, two autistic kids in a class, they'll automatically just be best friends, because they're both autistic, and that's not necessarily the case.
Speaker 1:The ease of communication doesn't necessarily mean that personalities will click. Yeah, and I think that's where sort of perhaps sort of the monotropic focus might be really useful, because then it's about figuring out what people enjoy and what people are really interested in, and following that and finding your tribe through that as much as anything yeah, yeah, I think that's a really important point because the double mv problem it's fantastic and it's fantastic that it's become so, that it's becoming so well understood.
Speaker 2:But yeah, a risk of it is that people take the message that autistic people kind of need to just be siloed off together. Oh, they'll be, they'll be fine over there, and yeah, that's not. I don't think that's not. I don't think that's a helpful take away from it.
Speaker 1:No, definitely not. But it's yeah, it's all. It's really fascinating. I think and we kind of, particularly from an Irish context anyway there's a massive movement and shift in terms of the sensory environment and people and businesses and sort of organisations realising that the sensory environment needs to be adapted, and sort of organisations realising that the sensory environment needs to be adapted for the individual and to make autistic individuals comfortable. And do you think that the communicative environment sort of needs to have a similar focus?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a really interesting question and it's also interesting to me to hear that there is that movement in ireland because there is a bit of a move toward more understanding about the impact of sensory environments, but I haven't seen it applied. You, you know super effectively yet where I am, but yeah, I think it's difficult because probably what needs to happen for the you know, in terms of improving the communicative environment is this almost paradigm shift or different way of thinking. I don't know if there's much that you can do in practical terms I mean, there are small things, but I think it is more of a different way of thinking. And also, the sensory environment will have a bearing on people's communicative abilities as well. So, um, the more overstimulated or overwhelmed an autistic person is, the harder it might be to communicate.
Speaker 2:Um, I don't know if fergus mentioned that when they were talking about monotropism, but, um, you know, if you have a pull on, if you're in a really overstimulating sensory environment and your attention's being sort of dragged in one direction, it could be harder to have resources to articulate what you want to communicate. Um, so I think adapting sensory environments will have, you know, a positive effect for communication as well. Maybe there's this. I didn't mention it earlier when you asked about sort of autistic communication, but there's a sort of really interesting school of thought within linguistics. A really small group of researchers have looked at autistic people's sensory pleasure of language and um sort of. You know how we can often play with sounds and almost like how the feel of words are, so maybe building a language aspect into how people think about the sensory environments might be interesting as well. That's a gorgeous idea.
Speaker 1:That didn't ever happen to me. That's really really lovely. Maybe it doesn't make sense to to think about them separately at all. There's something that we need to consider in tandem all of the time yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because also, all our kind of social interaction, it happens in our sensory worlds, doesn't it? And there's a, a way of looking at communication that sort of sees it as really embodied, and from the cognitive sciences and looking at, um, yeah, there's some more complicated ways of talking about cognition that are a little bit beyond me, but looking at how we kind of attune with other bodies, so, um, what's the book called hold on? Oh, it's just called. There's a book called linguistic bodies. Um, and it, it kind of frames communication as this, as a phenomenon that's rooted in the body, and so you're creating this kind of interpersonal embodied flow with, with your communication partner. So again, there's all the sensory aspects of that. Yeah, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:But yeah, it does, absolutely, it does. How interesting yeah that's a whole new direction for me to think about. And then, as we have quite a lot of um teachers who listen to the podcast and educate in general, um, are there sort of practical things that educators can do to kind of give that sort of communicative space to autistic young people in the classroom?
Speaker 2:yeah, again, I find it difficult to think of practical things. I think allowing time, like processing time, patience, um, and I guess you know, hopefully I'm sure educators don't do this on purpose, people don't do it on purpose but you know, sometimes it can be easy to sort of inadvertently shame autistic people for their misunderstandings or their literal interpretations, or if they don't quite get something as it was intended and you know, built into that is this, I think, assumption that there's a correct way to understand something and if you're not quite getting it right, you could be chastised or laughed at or, you know, even if it's playful. So, yeah, I think it's maybe about creating a bit more space for these different, you know, ways of interpreting and understanding things and giving those equal weighting and validity yeah, yeah, that you've actually made me think of of.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's a very long time since I was in school but you've made me think of. I had one particular teacher who just whatever way she would describe what she wanted us to do I never seemed to be able to follow what she meant and she would get so furious with me and it seemed that I was sort of the troublemaker of the class and I was just trying to get by, trying to be as quiet as possible. But and I think if she had sort of taken that step to kind of go okay, this is a communication that is happening between the two of us, going wrong somewhere and sort of taking that time to sort of think about how she was communicating, how I was receiving it, it would have made just such a massive difference, I think yeah, and so maybe that there's something there about you know taking an individual approach as well with students.
Speaker 2:I know teachers are really overstretched and you know for time and resources, but with instructions and you know make, I think it can be really helpful for autistic people to understand why you're doing something as well and particularly if you're looking at kind of recruiting, their motivation and you know their interest, which will let them be, you know autonomously do the task and engage in monotropism. So having a clear, having it really clear, like what the steps are, why we're doing it, yeah, and again, recently I was involved in a project where it was actually looking at um autistic people's reproductive health care experiences.
Speaker 2:But I spoke to a lot of autistic people with wombs about their um so it was autistic women, but also non-binary people and trans men about their um experiences of starting their periods and the amount of people I spoke to who said that they barely attended school, that they, you know, were non-attenders or didn't show up because of the lack of understanding they experienced. And that might be communication you know explicitly communication problems, but it might be like they were overwhelmed but their teachers didn't understand or they're in loads of pain and it wasn't. It was sort of written off as no, no, it can't be that bad. So some you know all of the challenges that young people can experience. They're all mediated by their ability to communicate them and be understood as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's huge, isn't it? It really is, and it just impacts everything, as you say. Um, that's what I wanted to ask a little bit about yourself as well, because I'm particularly intrigued with you because I studied um linguistics and psychology for my postgrad, so I wanted to ask you what brought you to to studying linguistics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I'd always had an interest in languages so I'd studied Latin at school. We had the option and in fact I didn't want to do it but my teachers kind of pushed me and I found that I really learned to love it. I think, like when you learn Latin because it's not spoken, you just focus on the grammar. Like when you learn Latin because it's not spoken, you just focus on the grammar, so you really dig into the kind of the way that words fit together and the logic of language. And then, yeah, I had a bit of a circuitous path through my young adult life of, like trying different jobs and not being able to sustain them the classic autistic career path, um, and I ended up teaching English as a foreign language, um, which you can do. You can do a two-week course and then you can start teaching, basically um.
Speaker 2:So I sort of managed to get into that and then again found that I really loved it and that led me into um, studying English language teaching, at the same sort of time that I had my autism diagnosis. And that's when I was really struck by this kind of uh, discrepancy between the ways that I was experiencing all these challenges in communication. But I could see people in my classes who maybe didn't have you know, much vocabulary or much kind of grammar resources, and yet they were communicating really successfully and it it just pressed this little button in my brain of thinking, okay, well, communication isn't about grammar and isn't about vocabulary, it's something else.
Speaker 1:so that, yeah, that's what got me interested and have you found that you've sort of learned a lot about yourself, both through study and then as you were writing your book, which is gorgeous, by the way?
Speaker 2:oh, thank you. Um, yeah, I, I think it sort of happened in parallel with me processing having an autism diagnosis and learning a lot about autism whilst learning about language, because I didn't know anything about autism prior to that. And yeah, it's interesting now because a lot of my friends are sort of even now have various neurodivergent diagnoses or are thinking about looking for them, you know, or identifying as neurodivergent, and it's wonderful and it makes sense because we're all sort of drawn to each other and it's wonderful and it makes sense because we're all sort of drawn to each other. But there's sort of like this, there's a clearer idea in sort of the popular mind, if you like, of like what my diagnosis.
Speaker 2:I didn't really have any models for it, apart from real sort of unhelpful stereotypes, and you know, like Rain man, like that kind of thing. You know understanding, learning more about autism, but then understanding more about, um, disability activism and you know the social model of disability and and social justice issues. So it's, it's really. It's really changed my thinking for the better, I think, and but yeah, um, when I look back I think how ignorant I was to it, but yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?
Speaker 1:because I was the same and even I sort of got my diagnosis as an undergrad and I had started working as a research assistant on a project that was based around sort of autistic communication. Yeah, initially I like I was like I mean, no one likes eye contact. Obviously it took me so long to kind of go, oh, hang on.
Speaker 1:But then the dream, and because I had to challenge so many of my assumptions around what it meant to be autistic similar to yourself, there wasn't that sort of representation and there were no kind of role models out there, so I had to navigate that on my own and then it was through meeting other autistic people and then sort of leaning into that sort of social justice side of things that it just sort of changed everything. So, yeah, it's a journey. Yeah, and looking back, is there like knowing everything that you know now, um, is there advice that you would you wish you could give to your younger self?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think, um, when I think about this question, my brain goes into a bit of a like an amoebius strip. I it sort of. It all feels a bit impossible, the time, the time looping, because I think my life as I've had it, without changing anything, the child I was, I think the best advice I would give her is just to know that she's okay, like she's a fine person, because it it. I just had this sense of something not being right and me being a bit. I felt like a bit of a monster when I was a kid and it's taken a lot of undoing to sort of, you know, teach myself. No, no, like you're absolutely fine, you were fine, you know you were just misunderstood, you were having, you were having difficult time. So, yeah, I don't, but I don't know if I would. You know, maybe if I was a kid now growing up now, maybe I, maybe I wouldn't feel like that because it there might be greater understanding in society yeah, that that's the hope, isn't it?
Speaker 1:that these sort of generations after that won't have the sort of battle scars that that, yeah, yeah, isn't that gorgeous to think. Thanks so much for listening to the podcast. This is a conversation-based interview designed to stimulate thinking and hopefully support the development of practice. It's not intended to be medical or psychological advice. The views expressed in these chats may not always be the view of meddletown center. If you'd like to know more about meddletown, you can find us on x at autism center and facebook and instagram at meddletown. You can find us on x at autism center on facebook and instagram at middletown center for autism. Go easy until next time.