Words and Inner Worlds
On language, my hyperlexia, and my son's nonverbal autism
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.
My autistic son is not yet speaking at three years old. As much as I’m hopeful that he may eventually gain speech, I’m just as prepared to accept that he may not gain speech at all.
There’s an unsettled debate going on around the use of the term “nonverbal” when referring to non-speaking autistic persons. The term “nonverbal,” the argument goes, makes it seem that autistic people who don’t speak aren’t or can’t be verbal in other ways, e.g., they don’t think in words. There’s an important distinction to be made between receptive and expressive language: a person’s inability to expressively speak doesn’t automatically mean a verbal inability to receive. Many non-speaking autistic adults remember their parents (and other adults in their childhood) talking over them, or talking about them as though they’re deaf or unable to understand the words being said about them in their presence.
Expressiveness, too, is not limited to speaking. The whole gamut of expressiveness includes writing, drawing images, using an AAC device, making gestures, moving one’s body and other objects, and a host of nonlinguistic ways.
That said, I’m settling with the term “nonverbal,” considering the nuances involved. The term “non-speaking” is (I think) more generally preferred, except by those who “speak” via an AAC device. My son is not yet capable of using a device so he really isn’t speaking at all, in the limited sense of the word. But I still prefer “nonverbal” because I don’t view that term in the negative at all.
In fact, majority of our communication, both neuro-typical and -divergent, happens on the nonverbal level. We don’t notice it because we’re culturally conditioned to privilege active, intentional speech. In the hierarchy of linguistic expressions, we tend to privilege: (1) what’s spoken over what’s written; (2) the verbal over the nonverbal; and (3) the intended over unintended meanings.
We tend to prefer what’s spoken over what’s written because of a bias for what’s immediate, explicit, and present (with writing, there’s the sense of an absent author leaving behind the words, while a speaker has to be present in order to speak). What’s verbal and intentional are preferred more, too, because they’re easily decodable, and they can be taken at face value. They’re straightforward and less complicated compared to what’s non-spoken, nonverbal, or unintended.
The thing is, it’s the non-spoken/nonverbal/unintended aspects that can make up as much as 90% of communication if the full spectrum is to be considered. It includes, among many others, eye contact (or non-contact), a very broad range of facial expressions and bodily gestures both subtle and obvious, conscious or unconscious behavior, tics and mannerisms, choice of clothes or hairstyle and other ways of representing the self. Even on the vocal level there’s tone, pitch, and volume — these incredibly important nonverbal components of spoken communication that, at times, can upturn words’ established meanings (as in forms of irony, like sarcasm). In inscribed communication (writing words, or more generally, inscribing marks on a surface), there are margins, the spaces around words and other markings, the mode of inscription that may hold meaning (for example, whether a note is handwritten or typed), the suggestive properties of strokes (weight, shape, color, etc.), and the relevance of materials used like the kind of paper, canvas, ink, etc., (for example, does the material have symbolic value? Does the material’s production or consumption history impart meaning, as in a montage?).
In short: there’s more to communication than language. And there’s more to language than the use of words.
A hierarchical or positivist view of language that privileges words, speech, and their intended meanings, which deems the nonverbal, the unintentional (like slips of the tongue), the unclearly expressed, and what’s left unsaid as secondary in importance, is a very impoverished view that discounts the depth and density of human communication.
Especially now with the possibility that my son might grow up nonverbal, I’m counting on the untold riches of nonverbal thought and communication to draw meaning from. Including meanings that I, in my privileged speaking (even hyperlexic) position, may not be able to discern or fully understand.
As a child I was, in contrast to my son, hyperlexic. My possibly autistic childhood only made sense to me when I began reading deeply into autism since my son received his diagnosis. Unlike my son who has zero words up to now, I learned to speak and read early on. By early elementary, I was reading my textbooks from cover to cover before a school year even started. Because I had good memory, I easily aced exams that only tested rote learning.
I was a voracious reader, but it didn’t mean I comprehended everything I read. I was just good at rattling off information I’d absorbed. But I do remember filling notebooks with stories I made up. And reading novels when everyone else my age couldn’t read books without pictures in them.
I felt very awkward and weird as a child and a teen because I spoke fast and without volume control. I was aware of it, because teachers would remind me to speak slowly, or people would tell me off when my loud voice was embarrassing them. I had no filters too, always realizing too late that I’d said something inappropriate or offensive.
In other words, I was hyperverbal with very little sense of the nonverbal. I was terrible at picking up nonverbal social and linguistic cues. With growing self-awareness, my hyperlexia came in in the form of overcompensating by way of words, i.e., in order to not be misunderstood, I tended to over-explain, to be very elaborate — for better or for worse.
With growing awareness of my lack (which makes me cringe all the time), I became obsessed with reading the nonverbal in people, in things, in everything. I was (still am) always afraid of missing something like a shade of meaning that could overturn whatever I understood at a moment. Naturally, I gravitated to literature, creative writing, and rhetoric — but I still hate having to speak, especially public speaking. The immediacy of speaking, in contrast to writing that buys me time for thought, makes me nervous every time.
The latest cringe moment I had was at an academic conference (I’m a literature professor) while presenting a paper. I was reading off a pre-written paper so I wouldn’t go beyond the time limit, but I found myself animatedly info-dumping that I didn’t notice the moderator frantically calling my attention to stop because I was grossly going over the time limit.
I didn’t know at that time what I know now about my own autistic traits. Looking back on that conference episode, I remember now (with newfound understanding) that the spotlight trained at me blinded me to audience reactions and nonverbal cues coming my way, a surefire way for me to slip into my inner world of intense “special interests” like the topic of my paper at that time.
I also didn’t know then that the topic of my paper had a bearing on my hyperlexia (and autism, if I am indeed autistic.) (Kindly let me digress a bit: frankly, I’m not that concerned to know by diagnostic standards whether I’m in or out of the spectrum. Perhaps I’m ambiguously neurodivergent and neurotypical. I claim my autistic traits, but I’m also very resistant to routine and repetitiveness, which cancels autism for me if conventional diagnosis is to be relied on. Perhaps the lines drawn to define the spectrum are arbitrary or not clear-cut in its relevance to my life at the moment — but I do care about the lines being drawn concerning my diagnosed son so I can better guide, raise, and advocate for him.)
Going back to the topic of my paper — it drew on my experiences of suddenly living on a beach and in its wild sensorium after a prior life lived absolutely landlocked, in cities. As a bookworm academic habituated on the city’s rigid lines and built environments, my whole life prior to moving to the beach was mostly lived in the abstract: in words, graphs and maps, calendars and clocks.
For a hyperlexic like me, navigating an abstracted world was easy, so suddenly moving to the beach with its shifting sands, unstable waters, and erratic weathers forced me to sense and feel and surrender, rather than to abstract (verb) sensory information into words, language, or any kind of organized knowledge. There’s something about the beach environment that resists linguistic abstraction or any kind of representation. The use of words to describe the experience feels reductive, grossly inadequate.
Whereas before, I made sense of my existence via words structured into sentences, paragraphs, and so on, at the beach it was my senses and feelings that ruled. This hyperlexic was suddenly made aware that there are modes of existence that rely more on the body than on the mind, that rely less on words and more on inexplicable feelings and sensations.
The beach was a thoroughly nonverbal, non-linguistic world that led me to think deeply about the limits of representational thought, and the immense possibilities of non-linguistic forms of being, expression, and communication.
When we moved to the beach, I immediately felt it to be home, like it’s the home I never knew I had or needed. The textures and tastes of the air and winds, the grains of sand that I could feel digging into the pores of my skin, the buoyancy and currents of water that enlivened my vestibular sense — it was sensory heaven! I felt so alive and raw, irreducible and untranslatable. Looking back now after learning about autism in my son and myself years later, I understand that the beach provided me then with a sensory diet that my hypersensitivity had for so long craved.
I wasn’t only hyperlexic growing up. I was, then as now, hypersensitive. I get migraines from bright lights, strong smells, loud noises. I pick up lots of environmental details that I easily get overwhelmed when the space I’m in is cluttered. I seek sensory rest all the time, but until I learned about autistic hypersensitivity, I blamed it on the migraines I suffered from since I was a child.
So it came as a huge surprise when instead of being sensory assaulted at the beach, I actually reveled in it. My migraines disappeared during the time I lived there though I walked barefoot on sand that wasn’t just hot but also blinding white, reflecting the sun. I learned to pick up scents that foretold a coming rain, a shift in the winds, or a dry spell. It was also never quiet on that beach: the waves crashing on shore roared like waterfalls; the palms rustled ceaselessly; the crowds shuffled in and out with their murmuring and chattering.
(But the migraines returned when my time on the beach was over and we moved back to the city).
As I look back on those magical years lived on the beach through the lenses of autism, hyperlexia, and sensory hypersensitivity, I realize how the timing couldn’t have been better. Not only am I now appreciating a past experience anew. My time there made me understand, before I had my autistic son, that it’s possible to feel fully alive in the realm of the senses and emotions where verbal expression is only secondary, not even necessary.
Up to now, I can imagine my being there, immersed in memories that are more visual and tactile in character (rather than verbal). It lives in my mind, and my hyperlexia can only go so far in expressing it for others to know.
If my son grows up to be truly nonverbal (meaning, he thinks not in words, but in senses, images, and feelings), I think I’m a bit more equipped now to go beyond language in trying to connect or understand him. I know for sure that he can be a whole and sensitive person without the usual ways of being and communicating.
It’s possible to live richly in ways that are not accessible by language.
This piece first appeared on Medium on Nov. 26, 2022 under a different title, “Hyperlexia and Non-Verbal Autism: Meditations on the Mysteries of Language.”