|
Fascination With Captions... And "Breaking The Code"... The autistic child’s absolute fascination with movie captions/credits could easily be explained by my theory that the autistic child needed to first understand the "parts" before he could comprehend "the whole". Letters were the first building block to understanding language. Time and time again, however, parents had stated that their children could communicate but still did not understand the concept of language, specifically, of the alphabet. Communication, they said could, occur through the use of PEC (Picture Exchange Communication) or other means, even without understanding the alphabet. Well, that was certainly true. However, not understanding the "concept of letters" yet, did not mean that the child was still not constantly striving to "break the code". So, if you think about captions, several issues could now be addressed. The best way for me to explain this was via the use of the example of "military decoding". The military was constantly trying to "break the code" of various organizations. I believed that this was also what the autistic child was doing... trying to "break the code". I then wondered, well, if this was true, why would the fascination with captions at the end of a movie still be there for children who did understand the alphabet... who had broken the code, and understood the basics to the concept of language. It took me very little time to come up with the answer. Did the military decoder stop reading coded messages once the code had been broken? No, if anything, he reads them with more passion... now understanding the basics and continuing to look for "the big picture" in order to piece more and more together… much in the way autistic children continued to look to decode things in their memorization of often worthless facts. I once knew a child who could tell you the make, model and year for every car ever owned by everyone he knew. Other children could tell you “all the facts” related to baseball players, etc. Much like the military decoder, so, too, did I believe was the autistic child looking to “further decode” as he captivated himself with captions... trying to understand "more and more of the code" to help make sense of his world. The autistic child knew their was "some kind of message" in all those captions... and they scrolled by so quickly that when he attempted to "decode" captions, his entire focus was on that task, explaining his very much fixated look and the often physical motion of moving up as close as possible to the television screen. If this thing called "the alphabet" was a code that helped explain so much in his life, of course, he would grasp every opportunity to further "break the code"... and to autistic children who were so often so very intelligent, captions provided an interesting and challenging code to be broken. I, therefore, think that, as boring as it was, parents should take the time to "pause" the VCR and explain these "caption codes" to their children... especially if their child had already mastered the concept of the alphabet. By explaining that these were the names of “people in the movie” or “people who made the movie”, you could perhaps prevent captions from becoming an overtaking source of fascination. In my view, it was absolutely critical to make them understand that this was, for the most part, truly “worthless” information as far as they were concerned and that the only purpose of captions was to let you know who had been involved in making a film. I encouraged all parents to take the time to provide this explanation for their children, and to do so as often as necessary in order to prevent “captions” from becoming “all consuming” in the life of the child. Understanding the “idea” behind captions was all the autistic child really needed to know. Parents had to do everything they could to help the child break the code as well as identify for the child those things that were meaningless in breaking the code to life! :o) Given all this, what happens when the autistic child was unable to "break the code" - specifically, as it related to language. The answer was quite simple. Either the child remained silent or, in his constant attempts to "break the code" attempted to understand communication and in doing so, engaged in and "ordering language" - something that had, in the past, been referred to as "nonsense language". |
|