Episode 288: Dr. Barry Prizant (Part 1): Echolalia and Gestalt Language Processing
This week, we share an amazing interview with Dr. Barry Prizant! Dr. Prizant is well-known for his work related to autism and echolalia, including research that was heavily cited by Marge Blanc and the Natural Language Acquisition framework behind gestalt language processing. Dr. Prizant discusses how he came to learn about echolalia and the confluence of research that suggested that echolalia had a communicative function (which he studied during his doctoral research). He also shares about the research behind gestalt language processing, how we can tell if someone has a gestalt or an analytical language learning bias, the true meaning of evidence-based practice, and more!
Key Ideas this Week:
🔑 We can learn about someone’s gestalt vs analytic language learning bias by looking at their reaction to modeling - what are they picking up on? Good language modeling, in the context of every day activities, can include combining words into utterances as well as functional gestalt phrases - it doesn’t have to be just "gestalt" or "analytical".
🔑 Some autistic people have not only intact, but exceptional memories. If you approach language from the perspective of “I have a great memory but don’t have the ability to construct generative language easily” then you would presumably learn to speak by listening to people and memorizing exactly what they are saying.
🔑 Some people with echolalia faithfully reproduce foreign accents and sounds in their environment. It goes beyond verbal speech - some people are echolalic in sign language and some people with echopraxia copy people’s actions.
🔑 When we are trying something that is an emerging practice, we can try it with kids and see how it works (provided it doesn’t cause harm). Sources of evidence include clinical experience and expertise as well as research. In many cases, it is difficult to apply what we know from studying a small group of people (e.g. 30) to the larger population, especially when talking about something that is unique to each person, like autism.
Transcript of the Episode
Please Note: This transcript was generated using speech recognition & AI tools; it may contain some grammatical and/or spelling errors.
00:00:08
Welcome to the Talking With Tech podcast. My name is Chris Bugaj and I'm here with Rachel Madel. Rachel. Yes, this is a big episode.
00:00:14
It's such a big episode. I'm so excited.
00:00:16
I've been really counting down the days until this episode airs, so let's give people a little back story about how this interview came to be. So for the last, I don't know year and a half, two years or so a topic that is, has everyone buzzing in the world of speech language mythology, in the world of learning language with AAC. And certainly it's been a topic on our podcast where we've talked to a bunch of different people with different perspectives and have reflected on it just you and I talking and banter segments. Certainly topic is that has come up at conferences where we've recapped what we sort of experienced at different conferences and that is the topic of. Gestalt Language Processing, Yes, it certainly seems to be controversial and it certainly seems to be something that a lot of people have big feelings around.
00:01:09
And as we sort of navigate our way through to find out sort of what is the way to approach Gestalt language processing, one of the ideas that came up with you and I sort of thinking about what direction do we take this? In the podcast you had this great idea.
00:01:26
Yeah. So, you know, kind of to reiterate what you were just saying, Chris, it's been on my mind in my clinical practice, I have been really eager to learn as much as I can about gestalt language processing. If you're a listener of the podcast, you know we've had Marge Blanc on the podcast Alexandria Zakos. We've covered this episode with Alyssa, Hillary Zisk, and Lily Conine. Lots of different kind of angles and.
00:01:52
And I think part of the reason it's controversial, it's it's because we don't know how to fuse what we know about AAC with what we're learning about gestalt language processing. And I think that's like a really important distinction because I think all of the work around Gestalt language processing and building education and awareness around it has been really powerful and really useful. But we're myself, we're trying to like, figure out, like how do we fill the pieces together with what we know about AAC? And so I decided I'm going to just go straight to the source. So I sent Barry Prizant, who is in the interview today.
00:02:27
I sent him an e-mail. We are big fans of Barry's work. He has a book called Uniquely Human and I remember reading that book and being really moved by that. And he also has an amazing podcast where he's interviewed lots of autistic adults and in fact his Co host on the podcast is autistic. So.
00:02:49
I decided I'm going to reach out to Barry and just one tell him I love his work. Two, ask him about gestalt language processing and reference some of his research. And three, like, why not just invite him on the podcast? You know, from one podcast host to another? Let's see if we'll go for this.
00:03:07
And I was. Just fangirling. When I got a response from him, I literally shrieked and was so excited to see his name in my inbox and he was so wonderful and he agreed to come on the podcast and so I just was so excited to have a conversation with him. You know, if you guys are in the field of speech, language, mythology, you have. Likely heard his name.
00:03:31
You have likely read a textbook in Graduate School that referenced him. And so he's such a amazing, he's done such amazing work for our field, and I couldn't be more excited to have had the chance to have a conversation with him. And then, of course, to have it recorded and to share it with you guys.
00:03:50
He was very generous with his time and we talked to him for quite a bit. So because this is such a long interview, we decided to split it up into two parts. So here's part one of our interview with Barry.
00:05:00
Welcome to Talking With Tech. I'm your host Rachel Madel, joined us always by Chris Bugaj. Hey, Chris.
00:05:33
Hi, Rachel.
00:05:34
And we are so excited to have Doctor Barry Prizant on with us today.
00:05:38
Thank you so much for being here, Rachel. It really, really is a pleasure. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
00:05:45
I I I feel like you don't need an introduction, but just for listeners who maybe are fresh to the field of speech language pathology, can you just start off by briefly introducing yourself?
00:05:55
Yeah, I am a speech language pathologist and I've been a speech language pathologist for I can't even say it anymore 50 years. And I always like to say to people that I started out and working in summer camps with kids, residential summer camps. Before I I pursued my degree in Speech, Language Pathology and Communication Disorders. And that was a great start to be on the ground with people with various labeled disabilities, misdiagnosis, where I lived with children and adults and was responsible for their happiness, their safety. And for five or six years.
00:06:40
For two months every summer, Yeah.
00:06:43
Wow. Yeah, I I feel like that experience has really probably shaped your everything you've done, because you have such an insight into kind of the day-to-day and every element of the day.
00:06:54
I feel like summer camp is so immersive and it's just like morning, noon, night, like all the different kind of activities, routines, everything, monumental influence. I always like to say that it certainly is nothing like living with a person you need to support in some cases 24/7 or love 24/7. But it's a little bit of that feeling of OK, what do we do to make sure we're all safe when we go on a trip into town or we go to the This was, I'm thinking it was Southern New Jersey. Now we went to the rodeo downtown or yeah, it it was just a incredible experience that I think about all the time. And then how was your career blossomed from there again with people who might not know about you.
00:07:42
What's happened in those fifty years? Well, in those fifty years, first of all, when it comes to autism and even the broader category of neurodivergence, I started focusing on that in my master's program and actually did my master's thesis on writing a manual for parents. We're talking about 1975, did my doctoral dissertation. We've published in many different versions on echolalia, and then one of the experiences that was very formative after my first few green PhD years at Southern Illinois University, where I I taught primarily at a master's and doctoral level. Then I was recruited by the Brown Department of Psychiatry, Brown University Department of Psychiatry in the Medical school to develop a department in a children's psychiatric setting.
00:08:38
And it was actually the first Communication Disorders department, a dedicated department in communication disorders in a children's psychiatric setting in the world at the time. And so I was working with mental health and child mental health professionals and child psychiatrists very early on in my career. I was in my 30s at that point and was exposed to an incredible array of learning opportunities, truly working with some of the leading psychiatrists in the world, Daniel Stern, Arnold Zamorov, who's actually a psychologist and was exposed to the transactional model of child development. I'm a child development person. That a huge part of my training was in social language, cognitive, emotional development in children at the time.
00:09:30
That there was an explosion of research in that area in the 70s and 80s. And the that was incredibly formative because I always feel we always have to look through the lens of child and human development. Well, OK, you mentioned the word echolalia and that is one of the reasons we're reaching out to you. So Rachel, unless you think we should do this differently, I'm just going to tell doctor present the story here. So in Rachel's and mine work and with the podcast and presentations we get to do and conversations we have with colleagues, we've come to to understand that there's a term out there called Gestalt language Processing.
00:10:14
And in our sphere of conversations, it seems like people land in one of two camps around Gestalt Language Processing. So before we go any further, could you take a second and just maybe describe in your words how you think of Gestalt language processing and then I'll describe how we see these maybe 2 camps forming? Sure. And I'll have to give you kind of the quick and dirty story here. In my research in developing the rationale for studying echolalia, I began to look into work that had been done in linguistics and psycholinguistics.
00:10:54
I actually was an undergraduate psycholinguistics major before I went to speech pathology, and I found little known references to children who were learning language using an alternative strategy of language learning. Because we spoke and we, I mean we all learn not that we spoke but we all learned about analytic language processors, that children build language from its basic constituent elements of words. Early multi word utterances for those SLPS out there, early semantic relationships and language was always thought of as creative. And why is it creative? Because what we're really learning is generative rules that are part of our cognitive knowledge of language.
00:11:46
But rather than kids just going from single word to early two word utterances to three word utterances to more complex grammar, in their development, there was this minority position of some kids, certainly a minority group of kids who were using, if you will, memory strategies to learn larger chunks of language. And the term gestalt language processing actually came from a linguist named Ann Peters and she published a book in the 70s called The Units of Language Acquisition. Actually, she published some articles and then the book came after the articles where she said and she knew nothing about. And she. And she didn't cite any work about children with language, disabilities, autism, whatever.
00:12:36
OK And she said, well, wait a second. Some typically developing kids start out by memorizing chunks of language that sometimes they could be 3-4 word utterances that they hear on a regular basis. And these are the kids. And this is actually my opinion, who some parents say, well, it's like, it's like he went from single words to long sentences and made that huge leap in development. OK, so let's get back to Echo Lelia.
00:13:04
I had worked with young kids as a speech language pathologist who a very echolalic. I follow those kids for a year and that became the data for my doctoral dissertation. I early days of video analysis. I videotaped these kids at home and at school in different settings, and I was being exposed to the literature, behavioral literature, especially Lovas from your neck of the woods, Southern California, UCLA, who was saying echolalia is meaningless parroting and it should be extinguished and we need to get rid of it. OK?
00:13:39
Now from the very beginning I knew that Lovas knew nothing about language development and many behavioral psychologists knew nothing about language development because how do you teach language? And this literally came out of the most prominent language programs that would develop by behavioral psychologist. First you teach kids to say sounds. Then you teach them to add more consonants into their sounds. Pop, pop, pop, pop.
00:14:06
And then you teach them to say, pop the balloon that you literally build language from sounds into words into sentences, which has nothing to do with the process of language development that hundreds of researchers were studying who would develop mental psychologists, psychiatrists, and so forth. OK, let's get back to the point here. So Gestalt language processing was a literature that said, no, wait a second, maybe this is what we're seeing in children, especially children on the autism spectrum, because even back then psychological research, and that's what it was called into the language of autistic kids. And cognitive processing pointed out that they had not only intact but in some cases exceptional rote memories. So let's tie this together.
00:15:03
OK, that if you approach language from the perspective of, I really got a good memory, but I don't have the cognitive ability to construct an internal generative language system that I'm going to learn how to speak by listening to people and memorizing what they're saying. And that was an exact description of what I was observing in the immediate echolalia and the delayed echolalia of the children I was working with every day. But then I went back to the parents and I said to them, your kids repeat speech a lot. Sometimes it's something they've they've heard in the past, Sometimes it's something they repeat immediately. Want to go out?
00:15:47
Want to go out? And I said to them, why do you think they do that? And I I didn't do no leading questions. I didn't say well, some people feel it's meaningless and so forth. And I got all these descriptions of how it was commutative.
00:16:00
OK And I said I got a dissertation topic here. So Gestalt Language Processing was what I took from Ann Peter's work, the description, but it mapped so beautifully onto all the research on not only intact but in some cases exceptional rote memory in individuals with autism, and it all of a sudden made sense. This is their cognitive style and the IT doesn't. And by the way, it goes well beyond speech that very often we see individuals on the spectrum having incredible visual memory, Not all, but many. And this is what term for that?
00:16:44
Eidetic imagery, photographic memory, where, and I remember this so clearly. A child I work with and this was a 12 year old, his school had gone to visit a museum and it was, I think it was the New York City, probably the Museum of Natural History, a room with full of dinosaurs and an old room, a huge room. And he told me I went to a museum today and I said, could you make a picture? Because I knew he loved to draw. Not only did he make a picture of dinosaurs in or or replicated pictures of dinosaurs, but he replicated cracks in the ceiling.
00:17:22
He replicated the exit signs. It was like he took a photograph of it in his mind, purely wrote, and was able to give all of the detail. So let's go back to Echolalia. There are some Echolalia kids who faithfully reproduce foreign accents. There's actually research on some kids before they move to echolalic speech.
00:17:46
They echo sounds in the environment. There is some literature, but not much about kids on the spectrum who've learned sign language and they are, they're echolalic in sign language. There's a literature on kids who repeat people's actions and the term for that is echopraxia. So it seems that even beyond speech that rote memory ability is related to this gestalt language processing, but it goes beyond just speech and language. So that has been applied by other people, Marge Blank in particular, you know and and in terms of laying out a philosophy of what Marge calls natural language acquisition, natural for autistic individuals, OK, but that it should be recognized as their alternative strategy.
00:18:42
Now I will say this since you guys are experts in AAC, I do know that it has also been applied to AAC. But I tell you the truth I I'm, I'm generally aware of the controversies around that in that most AAC approaches follow an analytic language development kind of strategy. But I'm not into the weeds of some of the more controversial discussions. So I've spoken a lot now and I'll hand it back to you guys. Well that was an excellent description.
00:19:13
Let me see if I can describe these two camps and then maybe just get your reaction on the these these two camps. So one would say 1 camp would say someone is born as a Gestalt language processor, or they're born as an analytic processor, and maybe there's some portion of the population that's a little bit of both, but they are two separate biological paths. That is something that you're born with. Now someone else, the other camp might say no, everybody's a bit of both. Some people, actually maybe most people produce echolalia in different ways, where you might say something and repeat it back or you might hear something from a movie and you'd use that as a script in your family.
00:20:05
In some, in some cases where not everybody in the world knows what you mean. But certainly it's shared amongst this small group of people so that it is a, it's part of being human is to. There is no separate camp and the reason I feel like it's important to try and distinguish whether one it's one or the other is because clinicians and educators are trying to find the best clinical practice. So if it's, well, if someone is a gestalt language processor and they're born that way, then maybe I need to use an entirely different approach than someone who's an analytical processor. Or if it's a little, if everyone's a little bit of both and maybe somebody's just more one way or more the other, then I could still use different clinical approaches.
00:20:55
An approach that is a little bit more analytical might still work. It just might not be as effective. Or I could use it in conjunction with it's not a closed door. So with that, what do you what's your take? I mean I I really see it as a continuum.
00:21:12
You've kind of laid that out. I mean I I guess it's a matter of gathering enough information to see kind of the the child's learning bias. Is it more of a a gestalt learning bias? Is it more of an analytic learning bias in in my research and I think this is you know much more classically observant in in kids on the spectrum and and autistic people where where you know sometimes you see autistic kids who are primarily you know gesture language learners and it takes a while for them to begin to move into generating novel multi word utterances. OK.
00:21:58
I don't have strong opinions I guess because we don't have good research on this and even we don't have any good research on getting you know good reliability on determining where on the continuum is this person of gestalt versus analytic. I know and and again I don't want to misquote because I'm not as deep into this as I should be, but I know that Alexandria Zakos, Alex Zakos, you know that she really both in AAC and in speech development, you know is is more biased towards let's be gestalt with gestalt learners. In other words, let's make sure that we are modelling whether it's through AAC or whether we're it's through speech. Let's make sure we're modelling kind of more gestalt chunks that are functional for the child in life. It it's kind of interesting because you know early on we we published a number of articles and chapters on Echolalia way going way back, you know to the 80s and to the early 90s and and we used to talk about helping gestalt kids breakdown the language to be more analytic.
00:23:09
Now a a certain and this doesn't enter the conversation enough, but a certain subgroup and it's a small subgroup of individuals who are echolalic are also hyperlexic and hyperlexia is defined as a self-taught precocious reading ability, actually decoding ability. That and is not good research that I'm aware of in longitudinal, even in the reading literature, in in terms of in longitudinal views and following kids who were very hyperlexic. I'm talking like 2 year olds who could read sentences, you know, that's a that's a very extreme end of hyperlexia, not understanding much, but just from anecdotal experience, for kids who I've known hyperlexic, it's almost like they're moving from rote reading with very little understanding. If we model the written language naturally and as part of everyday activities, they become more analytic in the sense of they're breaking down the units of meaning that it's no longer just a chunk that they use it. So I, I, you know, when you ask me where do I stand on those two positions, it's a great question that I haven't really thought about and that might be the reason you got me on the podcast.
00:24:33
You want me to stay with my opinions. Well that's exactly what we said. Why don't we just ask Doctor Prasan. Let's see, Rachel was the one was like I'm just going to write him and see what he says. I I mean, I I think good language modeling in the context of everyday activities and even shifting back and forth between kind of modeling analytic language in in a way that we're helping the child understand the rules of recombining words into longer grammatical utterances as well as gestalt functional phrases.
00:25:12
It it really comes down to looking at the child's reaction to our modeling and what they're picking up on. And that's, you know what I said. I was exposed to great people when I was in the department of Psychiatry at Brown. One of my mentors was Arnold Samarov, who developed, and he doesn't know, working disabilities all in typical child human development. The transactional model of child development and the basis of the transactional model, which has had a great influence on our field is that we need to be highly responsive to the way a child or a person is reacting to how we're communicating with them.
00:25:53
We have to be, of course, this is a big part of our search model. We have to be highly responsive to signals of regulation or dysregulation. And that makes us very different than most behavioral models where we walk in with a program that we've developed and we have to adhere faithfully to that program And we don't adjust flexibly to what the child is telling us through their speech or through their behavior. Now, I know some behaviors are going to say, well, we don't do that anymore. But you know, the point is that I think this pertains to our discussion here.
00:26:29
I I think until and I don't know if we're going to ever have research that tells us if a child's language sample is 75% looking gestalt, then we need to do this because so much. Let me give you a concrete example. It's very typical for kids who had been echololic for years, and now we're using very creative, spontaneous language to actually go back to echololic strategies in new situations, unfamiliar context. The beginning of the school, A new school year, being spoken to and asked questions by an unfamiliar person. In other words, even echolalia is not A and moving through to more analytic language is not fixed, where once you read a certain each a certain point you're there and then you're only there that it could really the degree of stress.
00:27:29
Because using gestalt language and scripts actually allows us to have less of a cognitive load in formulating language. OK, if we could just come up with a memorized script. We do this all the time, you know, So when you're saying, well, yeah, we all use some scripts in some gestalt language. Hey, how you doing? What's going on?
00:27:51
You know, it's like.
00:27:52
Exactly.
00:27:52
Great. How are you exactly? We do that even if we're ordering a pizza. You know, I'm about my favorite example for myself. And I believe you have Dunkin' Donuts out in California for going, you know, coffee.
00:28:07
You know, I might say, you know, medium hazelnut, extra extra light, no sugar, it's a fused chunk. And I don't have to go back and think, OK, how do I formulate all the pieces of what I want my coffee to be like, OK, So it's less of a cognitive load. And I don't think that's understood enough that we we all script. My another favorite example, you go to a social event, you really don't want to be there. You're tired.
00:28:37
But and you go there because your partner, you know if you're obligated to go with your partner and then you you see somebody you never really liked and that person approaches you and that person says, hey Barry, how you doing? Oh, fine. How you doing, George? Hey, Barry, I I hear that you you moved to a new neighborhood pretty close to where I live. Yep, new neighborhood.
00:29:01
I think it's close to where you live and you can carry on a conversation by repeating almost everything or part of what people say. You change the pronouns around a little bit. You could add no new information and you could keep a conversation going because you just don't want to focus on talking to this person and putting the energy into it. Those are called, by the way, the speech, communication literature. Those are called repetition strategies, right?
00:29:25
We would say in the AAC world, repetition with variety. So we want to repeat but just change the words a little bit so you understand how those words can be used in different ways, in different contexts exactly. And then the term for that in the Echolalia literature is mitigated Echolalia and mitigated. You know it always kind of confused me because I always thought of mitigated is you know you you make something less OK. But the term mitigated echolalia and I think it I first read it by a wonderful speech language pathologist, Warren Fay, who published early in the in the echolalia literature.
00:30:04
He was a professor at University of Oregon Health Sciences Centre. He passed away a number of years ago and I'm one quote that I, I cite a lot, Warren said at that time. If we're not sure whether Echolalia is functional and it's helpful or not helpful and interfering for autistic kids, shouldn't we give them the benefit of the doubt, right?
00:30:28
Exactly.
00:30:29
What's what's the least dangerous assumption? It's more dangerous to assume that it has no meaning. So you have the least dangerous assumption. Assume it does and be respectful of it. That seems something that both camps agree upon.
00:30:44
We'd start there as a as a way to bring everybody together. It's like, let's not abate it anymore. Let's respect it. Yes, I mean, yeah.
00:30:55
Go ahead. I was going to ask and well, kind of give context to the AAC why basically why this is important? All right, I'll happen. So I think one of the reasons this question becomes so important with AAC is that when we're working with complex communicators who are either using Augmentative Forms of Communication or alternative. It's hard from a motor planning perspective to follow, you know, a model where we're using long phrases in an AAC system and then we're trying to mitigate those phrases.
00:31:33
And so I think, you know, for myself, clinically I have been supporting my students and very aware of what approaches they're responding. To and really using that information clinically to decide what I'm doing and and how I'm moving forward. But I think the AAC community is feeling very challenged by the the idea of how. How do we, I mean AAC systems are set up analytically, right. It's set up with words that we learn the motor plans for.
00:32:03
And so it just becomes a challenge when we're trying to support our our communicators the best way possible and you know therapy and and you know all the work that we're doing. And so I think that it made me feel better that you said, like do a little bit of both and see, you know, how a child responds. Because I feel like that's what I've been doing clinically and I've been seeing a lot of success with that type of strategy.
00:32:27
Yes. And as a matter of fact, I, he was never really a colleague. But a distant colleague of mine, Howard Shane, not too long ago shot me an e-mail and said, what do you think about all this gestalt language processing stuff? And I didn't know the ulterior motive underneath the question as you, just as you just exactly explained. And and I I became gradually aware of that.
00:32:56
But I can't say I'm enough of an expert or even enough experienced and right up to date on, you know, high tech systems where I could say, OK, I've had this experience with kids, where I've observed enough kids where somebody's taking a more of a gestalt approach versus an analytic approach and how kids are responding. But what you said is totally consistent with my philosophy and that is if we don't have, you know a robust research literature and I, I, you know I'm even very skeptical of that because still every child is different. You know you can't say we've done this study with 30 kids who we thought were Gestalt language processors but non speakers and therefore our findings pertain to every new kid who walks through the door. Right. So it it's, you know what you're saying aligns beautifully with with with my philosophy is you know when we're trying something that's an emerging practice and if we want to put that there, yeah, I mean this is something that's so misunderstood especially in the autism literature.
00:34:01
But people say, well you know that's not evidence based. We don't have this research based to support using that. Well, that would preclude any emerging or promising practices and they're at the and I'm not making up those terms, you know, they're actually. And it was a behaviour analyst who said a number of years ago, Richard Simpson, he published an article a number of years ago saying he he was increasingly upset about behavior analysts relying solely on peer reviewed public research. To say we will do that or we won't do that at all, there has to be a cost benefit ratio that if there's not a robust research literature why not try it if there's not a downside to it and see how kids react to it and and we can go on and on.
00:34:50
You know, I'm not going to get into the weeds of everything I'm going to say now but for the longest time people thought social stories not evidence based don't do it. And gradually in evidence based developed for that we can go back to AAC, early days of AAC, no evidence base for that. We could take it up now to the gestalt using Gestalt processing strategies in AAC. We have to look is there really a downside? And not only that, but I published an article on this a few years ago.
00:35:21
Evidence the the the source of evidence is not just peer reviewed, published research. It's it's clinic, it's it's family values. It's client values. It's clinical experience and expertise. Even if you're not an SLP, it's the expertise of other professions, OT special educators and so forth as a team feeding into documenting what seems to work and not.
00:35:52
And then there are different opinions about how you even define it works or it doesn't work. It's true. Something you hit on there has been a a staple of our podcast and something we've been trying to trumpet is here. We are recording this in 2023. We have so many more autistic individuals that can tell us what worked and what didn't work.
00:36:16
So let's listen to them. Is that fair? 100%, absolutely. I mean it. It's and.
00:36:26
And the thing that drives me crazy, I've written, I've published on this, I've written on this is if you look at Asha, definitions of evidence based practice. If you look at American Psychological Association definitions of evidence based practice, it includes that triad of research, clinical practice, family client values and feedback. Yet we tend to ignore that. And I I hate to say it, but sometimes on the Facebook page on SLPS and evidence based practice goes down that Ave. well, I'm on all the research evidence.
00:37:07
We shouldn't be doing it if there's no research and it's it's like go back to the definition of evidence based practice of the professional organization, please.
00:37:18
That's funny that you mentioned that triangle because Chris and I do a lot of presenting and when we present, it's usually what we lead with and we're really highlighting the the, the client perspective because we think that's the most kind of underutilized. But it's funny you brought that up because, you know, we we asked the question like what is evidence based practice and everyone says research. Everyone says everyone focuses on the science, right? But it's a triangle, It's a triad.
00:37:46
You know one of the things that I think we've lost and now I can play my elder statesman role here in not only in my training but in in my deep knowledge. At the time of the emerging research in the 80s and 90s, especially the so so-called social pragmatic revolution, what was emphasized over and over by the leaders, you know, Elizabeth Bates, Catherine Nelson, Roger Brown, the leaders that established this re rich research base in language development. OK, typical language development. What was the emphasis, Individual differences in development. And yet we still go back to that easy position of, well, you know, this research with so many kids says we should do this with all kids as opposed to looking very, very carefully at individual differences.
00:38:39
I mean, there was an article, I think the guy's name is Jason Travers, who's done some stuff in behavioral psychology, which I really don't like too much. But he actually published an article that he he was arguing there's no such thing as different learning styles. All people learn the same. And it's based upon a behaviourist view of how people learn. And it's kind of like, OK, so go ahead and just ignore, you know, going back, you know, even to Howard Gardeners work on multiple intelligences, just ignore decades of research on individual differences and how people learn.
00:39:13
How could you do that, you know? And some people in the field, unfortunately, they make their arguments on a very myopic view of the research they chose to, they choose to focus on. And they don't go back to the rich history of research in child and human development and how every person is different. And that's exactly. And I know you want to talk about this.
00:39:36
It's exactly what nerd diversity is about, right? I was just going to ask you this. So do you mind if I ask this question in a certain way? Because it's something that plagues me and I have two Imps on my shoulder whispering different things. So if you clarify this for me, maybe it clarifies this for lots of people.
00:39:52
So the term neurodivergence are are neurodiversity versus the term neurodivergent as an or as an adjective to describe one person. So for instance, you just described how everybody's different, right. So in that way, everybody's neurodivergent from one another, it's describing a human condition that everybody's neurology is slightly different and you can't necessarily pinpoint somebody into a category. Or is it? So the other imp on the other shoulder, No, there's two categories, neurotypical and neurodivergent.
00:40:30
And you are one or the other in the same way. Are you a Gestalt language processor or are you? So again, what's your take on that? Is it that there's two types of people, Neurotypical, neurodivergent or neurodivergency represents a human condition of all of us? Well, yeah, I mean, again, once again, we're talking about a continuum actually for both terms.
00:40:53
But I think when we talk about neurotypical, we go back to the bell curve and and you know, what seems to be the majority position for most people and neurodivergent, you know, would be the far ends of the bell curve because people emphasize too much a condition that's disabling, OK. But neurodivergent could also be a person with savant skills, right? If there are. And now, then again, we just can't talk about intelligence as one thing because a person can be. Well, this may not be the best analogy.
00:41:35
I've never used this before, but let me throw it out there, OK? I have a number of friends and colleagues who prior to Asperger's, be thrown out of the autisms back that got diagnosis of Asperger's. OK, their language abilities. I'm not talking about social communication. I'm talking about their language abilities are neurotypical in a lot of ways.
00:42:01
OK, but they're neurodivergent in terms of risk factors for anxiety. So they tend to be more anxious and sometimes have, you know, a secondary diagnosis of anxiety disorder on top of what's going on. So. So my point is that, right, neurodiversity covers kind of the full range. All humans have different brains, so we have different patterns of strengths and weaknesses, and some of those weaknesses are disabling.
00:42:35
OK. Neurotypical would be OK. You fall within, you know, whatever it might be, the 8090% of that bell curve and that bell curve you're speaking, it would be consistent with different abilities like. So there's a bell curve for language, there's a bell curve for social emotional regulation. So there's not necessarily one bell curve, It's multiple bell curves for each ability or each skill setter.
00:43:06
Is that fair? Yes, exactly. As a matter of fact, I do a workshop under a diversity and I have the bell curve and I under an asterisks about 7-8 different areas that you need to consider what that bell curve applies to. OK. So again, individuals on the spectrum who have an exceptional rote memory or let's take another example, calendar calculators.
00:43:33
OK. So I mean they could tell you, you know if you give them a date in the future, what date it falls on, you know, September 19, the year 3000. OK, well that falls on a Tuesday. You know it's like that certainly would be Neuro Divergent. It's well beyond the bell curve abilities or the the the majority of what the bell curve our ability would be for most people and I don't think that's emphasized enough yet.
00:44:00
It's spoken about when we talk about, for example, employment for people who are neurodivergent. Let's look at the areas that they may show relatively and not even relatively absolutely strong abilities or exceptional abilities and let's have them participate in employment settings so they can apply that strength. OK. So I I use the term neurodivergent when a person is kind of beyond what we would expect in the general population, the majority of what that bell curve tells us. Yet having said all of that, we're still working out these definitions.
00:44:47
OK. So you and, and you're correct when you said that you know, neurodiverse really shouldn't be applied to a single person or diversity is a larger group of people. Yet people I still see and in some cases people I know who've published, you know, in peer reviewed research saying oh, that person is neurodiverse meaning that they have some condition which we would call neurodivergent. So yeah.