Prepare to enter the wild and wooly world of an adult with Aspergers Syndrome, a form of autism characterized by intellignce, quirks, social difficulties and downright strange and oddish behaviours.

People with Aspergers generally are high functioning in everyday life but have great difficulty connecting with others due to the inability to read faces, body language and subtle verbal clues. They also tend to take words literally and have a hard time multi-tasking.

Oversensitivity to touch (clothing has to be soft and often the tags removed), light (do not leave home without the sunglasses), sound (loud noises and noisey places are avoided), taste (many Aspies have quite a limited diet and are frequently very picky eaters) and smells makes the everyday existence more of a challenge.

Fasten your seatbelts and come on in...
To find out more about what Aspergers is..please check out my earliest blog entries

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Making Strange Noises...Theres a word for it...Vocal Tics & Aspergers


For quite awhile, I have been searching for the word or term for my various odd utterances...those moments were words escape me and I produce a series of vocalizations, grunts, animal noises, or otherwise strange sounds that are not words. Things such as aarrgh, which I call my pirate sound and tht, tht, tht, tht, in which it sounds like a rapid fire machine gun or phewsh, which is more like a cannonball hitting the water. These are some of the sounds I produce when I get stressed and my word/ verbal center shuts down or short-circuits and I am reduced to mere utterances.
Well,I finally found the name for it: Vocal Tic (also similarly verbal tic or phonic tic)- an involuntary sound produced by moving air through the nose, mouth or throat; VTs include throat-clearing sounds & sniffing to grunts & verbalizations of syllables & words, utterances of inappropriate or undesired statements or obscenities.
There are two types: Simple- single sounds-eg. throat-clearing, barking, sniffing and Complex-verbalizations- expressions of words-eg. coprolalia (from Greek kopros "feces" + lalein "to talk", involuntary swearing or the involuntary utterance of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks), echolalia (repeating of the persons own words), palilalia (repeating ones own previously spoken words)
VTs frequently change and vary in severity and over time remissions and exacerbations are common.
Whew, now that makes some good sense. That is what I have from time to time. I seem to only have vocal tics when I am stressed out or feeling strong, conflicting or overwhelming emotion.
I love it when I find the proper term for things and it drives me nuts when I fail to locate it. Every thing has an appropriate term and once i can find that term, it all makes sense. Its like I keep trying to build this house of cards and if I can't find the word, I can never get to the top...that one level just refuses to stay in place and support the next. Dang, thats a very strange analogy but it is the immediate visual that I experienced..somewhere, deep within my head, it makes sense :)
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