Language and Asperger's

My precious ten-year-old brother and myself

I'm starting with what is freshest in my memory: my ten-year-old brother and his struggles with language.  This cutie was born in 2002 when I was ten years old.  I was pretty young, naive, and self-obsessed, so my parents' concerns with his development was off my radar.  When he was 18 months old, he began early intervention services.  When he was almost three (and was finally beginning to develop primal language), he was diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS).  At the age of six he was re-assessed and diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism.  All I understood at the time was that having a baby brother was not all it's cracked up to be.  Now that I have dedicated my future to working with kids on the Spectrum, I am a bit more aware of his needs.

Language has always been a struggle for O'Reilly.  At the age of two, he could only say or sign a total of eleven words (in comparison, most two-year-olds have begun to form and use two-word phrases).  At age three, his language development exploded, and by four he was capable of producing language similar to his peers.  Yet there was still something off: when he was hungry, instead of asking for food, he would throw his juice cup or plate or bowl rather than ask for something to eat.  When he needed help with something, such as reaching a toy, he would sit and cry rather than ask for help.  He still couldn't communicate his needs, despite his physical capability to produce the words.  When he began reading, he picked up vocabulary faster than I have ever witnessed.  "McAlister, stop being so obnoxious.  You're aggravating me,"  I call him saying to me when he was about four and a half.  Little did I know he had no understanding of the words, and simply understood that when I behaved a certain way, those were the words my mother spoke.

O'Reilly seemed to enjoy reading from a young age: he was a phenomenal decoder and had excellent word recollection.  But, when given the choice, he would pick up the same copy of Where the Wild Things Are and read it again and again without fail; he needed the consistency.  Today, as a fifth-grader, O'Reilly prefers reading nonfiction books above all else.  I believe this is due to the lack of emotional content in such texts.  The language of emotions, empathy, and of course figurative language are a constant struggle for him.  A text about Pearl Harbor, though it may describe the sense of loss the nation felt, is less likely to include phrases such as "She left him frozen, walking away with a cold shoulder and ice-dagger eyes."  He lacks an understanding of such terms, both the figurative meaning and the emotional implications.  For a kid who thinks tooting your own horn means to fart, most fiction works are a struggle to comprehend.

How O'Reilly would view a "cold shoulder." His next question would likely be "Why doesn't she just put on a jacket?"

O'Reilly's lack of basic Theory of Mind comprehension leads to a significant lack in reading comprehension.  In my opinion, his education has needed more emphasis on this understanding to give any hope to improving his reading comprehension beyond a surface understanding.   In an effort to diminish such literary short-comings in my own students, I plan to emphasis a development of Theory of Mind through book analysis.  What emotions do characters show?  How might this affect their behaviors?  Why would that change the story?  If my brother had been exposed to such practice rather than a focus only on how many words per minute he could ready, maybe he would have a greater comprehension of not only literary characters but also fellow human beings.