3 Key Differences Between Autism and Speech Delay

These are the key differences between speech delay and autism, according to my own opinion as a speech therapist who's been working for 10 years now. Number one is language function. So what is language function? Right? It's the reason behind why we talk, why we use language. Right? For instance, the language function right? Now, why I'm doing this video is so that I can inform and educate you, right? Whereas children on the spectrum, they have different functions from typical developing children or children who are delayed or disordered, and that's a tendency. I'm not saying everyone's going to be like that, okay? But most of the children who are on the spectrum, they use words and phrases for entertainment purposes, and they remember scripts and chunks of things that would help them soothe themselves in an anxious situation or when they're, like, just bored anxious and they're trying to entertain themselves. Now, I'm not saying that everyone's going to do this. I'm just saying in general. Some people call it scripting, some people call it self stimulation. Doesn't matter at the end of the day, because what we're trying to look at is the function of the language. What is it used for? Right? It doesn't matter if a child can speak a whole long sentence and then they use it the wrong way. And you see this over and over again, it's the inappropriate word and phrase at the inappropriate time, it might be appropriate for them for that, the child on the spectrum. And this comes down to understanding or even caring about a social cue or situation. What is deemed correct, what is deemed inappropriate, whatever. I know society has their own rules, and maybe like some of you guys don't think we should put these on our children, but at the same time, this is just what it looks like. I'm not saying whether it's right or wrong. Okay? So children who are a little bit more delayed on the speech and language side. Now, delay in itself, it means that the typical developing milestones are like this, right? Delay. It just means, oh, it's shifted delay. It's a little bit later. Now, a lot of professionals nowadays, they don't use the word delay anymore. They would rather use like impairment or disorder because delay connotates and meet that there's a meaning of that, someone will catch up. So a lot more professionals are scared and they try to save their own, you know, reputation by not using the word delay. But that's not the topic of today, right? So those delayed individuals, those children, they tend to use words and phrases in the more correct contexts, even if they don't have the correct words or the phrases, they might use it for the right reasons. Okay. And just to give you an example, if they don't know a word, they might just try it out. They might use another word for it. They might describe the word around the word. Right? If they see an airplane, they don't know the word airplane. It might be car, fly, whichever. And whereas comparing to children on the spectrum, they might know the word very well. Oh, look, it's an airplane. But that commenting is not. Commenting is for their own self. They would say that phrase whether or not you are there. Right? Whereas someone who is pure speech and language delay, they probably won't even talk when no one's around. Okay? So that commenting on an, an autistic child, that's not necessarily something that is sharing. Some parents will reach out to me and say, oh, my child can do commenting. They can request, they can do it. These are language functions that children have. And if you want to read all these language functions, just search language use or language function at speech therapy at the end on Google and you'll see a bunch of just language functions that you can go through. Oh, can my child do this? That like asking a question, answering questions, greeting, commenting, getting attention, asking for clarification, all these good stuff. All right. And language functions. The last thing I wanted to comment about is that children on the spectrum, they're 10, they tend to be a little bit more need perfect based. Now I'm not saying that children who aren't on the spectrum who are delayed won't have a lot of need based language because that's the first function that we learn as an individual. Right. If you go on a holiday and don't speak a language, what do you learn first? How to ask for the bill, right? How to ask for something. Is it requesting of something? So a lot of times requesting a need based language is the first that we learn as a language function. But a lot of autistic children, they get stuck there for a very long time. In fact, every. If we just go into any clinic right now, a lot of them are teaching, I want something right, which is not cool. Actually. I don't like it. And I've talked about this many times why I don't like it. I think need based language has its place, but at the same time we have to evolve out of it because if we don't have other contexts, it's very hard to develop higher language. All right, so there's a difference there. All right, Children who are purely delayed, right. They will Exhibit more language functions even if they don't have the words for it. Right. They might show you something, they might want to ask you a question. They might protest, they might get into. They might have more emotions that aren't to deal to do with something they want necessarily. It might be something else that you've done or said that have hurt the emotions or. Whereas autistic children, they may or may not care as much. Okay, I use this word carefully when I say care doesn't mean they totally don't care. It's just that, you know, when they're using language is a lot more need based. They want something from you and then they will talk a lot more and the language just stops there for a lot of them. All right. The second difference is play skills, right? So children on the spectrum, they have a very focused interest. And I won't use the word narrow because I don't think so. It's just that it hasn't been expanded yet. Children who are on the spectrum, they love something deeply. They deeply love something and they won't deviate from that. In fact, I know one autistic woman who was in her 30s, she still loves minions. She loves it. In fact, she has like huge minions at home because she can now afford it because she's an adult now. She can do whatever she wants. But that play skill actually limits what kind of things they learn how to do. Because what play is now, play can be an indicator of cognitive ability. When we're doing an assessment, which, which is too true because play is just an assimilation basically of what we are doing in the real life. Right. That we may not have things like we don't have that kind of exposure to. So if you look at all the toys in a toy store, it's all a mimic version of what we're, what we have in real life. It might be a toy vacuum cleaner, it might be like a toy washing machine, it could be a lawnmower, it could be anything. Right? And it could be like that. It goes into different things, imagination, like role playing, creating structures with Lego, doing stories or whatnot. And if you don't have those interests or you don't find those interesting at all, then it's very hard to develop those language that's associated with it. Okay. And because of these focus interests, it's very difficult for children on the spectrum to share and play together. All right? And I'm saying this as a very general term, all right? Most, and I say most autistic children, just getting to playing together takes A very long time. In fact, it's a huge goal that we do if we're getting a child's school ready. And I'm not saying there is a portion of children who are purely speech delayed who will also have this problem, who will also have focus interests, who will also line up toys. Right. But does it mean that they're autistic? Not really. I'm just telling you the differences right now. When they're lining up the toys, a speech delayed child might be thinking about something else, but the imagination, their play skills might be something that is, that has a functional, what we call functional use for it. Right. But an autistic individual or a child might be lining up for the sake of it. Okay. You have to look very deep into the individual child about why it's like that. It's not just very symptomatic approach. Oh, the play school sucks. Are they lining up toys? Oh, they're throwing toys instead of playing it correctly. What is the reason behind it? Why are they so focused in those interests? Those are the key differences. It's the underlying reason. Right. And at the end of the day, if you see a child who has difficulty in sharing and playing with other children, usually it means that they haven't even learned to, to share and play with you, the adult. So it's developmental. Right. When we're teaching something, we want to teach from the easiest first. The easiest would be playing by themselves. Right. And then as they play by themselves, there's some like, we expand the interest, right. And then when they expand the interest, we get into like sequential play, and then we get into pretend play. And after that, it's between the adult and the child, and after that between peers. Okay. A lot of parents will straight shoot straight into the goal that is so far away. And they would say to me, ming, I want my child to play with other children. How can I do it? I want to ask you if you were a gymnastic coach and I said, I want to learn how to backflip. But, but the problem is I can't even do a four role. Right. Obviously the next step would be to get them to, to do step number two. And this is me just trying to going to tell you whatever that you're thinking about right now, you have to tone it down and think about what the next step is. Right. Okay. Number three is sensory profiles. So autistic children, they have a huge range of sensory profiles and a lot more prone for autistic people to have different sensitivity as opposed to neurotypical people. Now, I'm not saying that children who are purely delayed or have other conditions, they won't have sensitive sensitivity issues. I'm not saying that. In fact, a lot of children who are speech delayed, they have certain sensitivity issues as well, especially in the hands, in the neck, hearing, volume, pitch, all those. It's just that autistic children, because there's a difference in their neurological thingies going on in the brain, they're a lot more prone to sensory things, okay? There's two types. There's hyposensitive. Hypo means there's a lack thereof, right? There's not enough sensory. And then hyper is like, it's too sensitive. So for myself, even though I believe I'm neurotypical, if you look at my hands, it's rather red, right? So my hands have been made fun of for a very long time for being very red and, I don't know, soft and stuff is because my hands are hypersensitive, right? So if the weather goes dry, I need to put on cream to feel normal again, okay? And the same with my ears. If there's a concert, it's too loud. I need to put in earplugs, right? And that's why when I was working with the children, I was thinking, oh, dude, if I feel this way, just imagine how much they feel, right? So you have to put these into account. The differences are that it can be all over the place, right? Some autistic children have a difference in sensitivity even on their face. Like, their nose might be hypersensitive, but their mouth is hypo, right? And the ears are high sensitive as well. But then the cheeks are normal, right? So you don't know. And this is a key difference. Sensory is all mumble jumbled up. And you will have to see an occupational therapist to do a better assessment about what's what. Okay? I cannot tell you here. All right. Another key difference is that when you do sensory regulation or like you help a child on the spectrum to regulate, it tends to work a lot more. So things like a weighted blanket, right? Things like something to squeeze on, like those sensory toys tend to work better to regulate a child's emotions than with a typical developing child or a delayed child, right? So that. That's a key difference. And if you're still. Here's a bonus for you. The last thing I want to talk about is language development differences. Children on the spectrum, they tend to develop language in a disordered fashion. We call it disordered. It means that you know how there's A puzzle, Right. And typical developing is that we put puzzles chronologically, and it will go one by one until it's full. Right? But disorder means I put a puzzle here, I put a puzzle there, I do whatever, and then it slowly fills up. Right. So disorder means not in order, basically. Right. When you look at it. I'm not saying that pure language disorder. It does. Of course it does happen, but it's a tendency for autistic individuals to develop language in a disordered fashion. All right? That's a developmental difference, and then there are social differences. All right? And I'm not trying to say. The whole video is not trying to say. For me to say, look, they're different. This is the general. Like this. I'm not saying this. Children who are on the spectrum, they can develop, and they will develop relationships, they will develop language, they will develop their hobbies, their interests, their love life, all these things. So I'm going to tell you, like, two stories here, and then I'm done. Okay? The first story, there was a child called jay. He was 4, and we wanted to get him into kindergarten. It was very hard for him. So the only person that he really, truly knew was me. So I went with him and his mom to see this international school in Hong Kong. So we got there, and Jay was very excited. He was not, like, screaming and shouting, like what we call typical autistic child. He was not. In fact, he was very calm, but he couldn't fit in. Like, you can see that he physically and mentally and emotionally couldn't fit in socially even. And what he did next, like, really shocked me. He came up to me, he was pulling me, and he's like, Mr. Ming, look at all the children here. I'm like, what's going on? And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's a lot of children, Jay. And then he was like, yeah, look at all the children. Wow, look at that one. That one's in the. In blonde hair. That one's in black hair. That's a girl. I'm like, okay, you're treating your classmates like animals in the zoo. I. I understand that. So somewhere down the line, he started to make friends. And when he started to make friends, he didn't start to view them as animals. And actually, for this particular child, Jay, his focus interests were animals. His favorite toy was Noah's Ark. His favorite Bible story was about Noah. Right? He loves anything to do with animals. So then sometimes people, professionals, teachers would say, oh, autistic children don't know how to generalize their skills but it's not actually like that. The generalization skill is actually disordered as well. So sometimes they over and think everything is going to go the same way or that they cannot generalize and think that one way can only work in that one way only. Right. So in this case for J, he thought that he overgeneralized that. Whatever. When there's a bunch of animals or people, those are just for observation and he would laugh at them. He would go around and point and tell them to go in a line or whatever. So that was the overgeneralization. Okay, so the next story I want to talk about is also another person. As a girl from Indonesia, she was 13 and when her mom was doing some coaching with us, felt like she couldn't have relationships with her, with her classmates. You can tell just by looking at her. I'm not trying to be mean or whatever, but when you see her, you know that she is on the spectrum. All right. I think it's to do with the eyes, how her eye gaze works. Right. And some people will say, oh, eye gaze hurts an autistic individual. I don't really think so. I just think that they don't know where to put. I think 90% of the time, disgustment. This is not true. There are some people who is true, which is self proclaimed, by the way. I have no idea. I'm probably going to get a lot of hates in the comment if this video goes. We get more views on this video. But what she did and her name, let's call it G. All right, G. She didn't have enough interests. All she cared about was Mickey Mouse and friends. That's the biggest hurdle she had was so when we taught her to tell stories, to play with toys that were supposed to be for five to six years old, right? She's 13. Okay. We go backwards. A lot of therapists will say that's not age appropriate. Right? But the problem is if we don't have those skills in the beginning, how do we go on towards the skills that actually make sense? What we did was we taught her like even cook sets, right? We pretend to bake cakes and then we change those play skills into real cooking. Right? And then when she finally got into it, she really liked it. We start to introduce her mother as a playmate. And then when her mother was okay, introduced to help her. And then we introduced peers. And then when we did that, it was a lot easier for her to actually make friends. In fact, we start making videos of her doing the cooking, playing with stuff, doing toy reviews and then she actually got a lot more confident in the way that she was communicating. And I think after a year she actually got invited to school as a master of ceremony for the Christmas event. So I was very proud, I was very happy. And this was done all without me. I was just coaching the mother. At the end of the day, we have differences and that means we need to teach children on the spectrum differently from those that are just purely delayed. Now obviously they're super. There's a big overlap and what we do, but it's about thinking why are they doing this? The reasons for their behaviors are different. Okay, so that's the end of this video. If you liked it, please give give us a comment. Subscribe and then we have a bunch of free courses. The link is just in the description below. That's it for right now. And if you want to watch the next video, it's right here. See ya.