Unusual ability to pronounce foreign languages?

Post Reply New Topic

After being diagnosed with AS one thing that I was curious about my whole life finally may have an explanation.

Ten years ago, in a English class, at some point the teacher asked me if I had ever been to UK because of my pronunciation, according to him much better than average basic English students (at that time). I told him I never went abroad. It seems he didn't believe me.

Two years ago, in a French class, at the end of the first class, after reading an entire paragraph in French for the first time, the whole class started to laugh at the end. The reason was my good pronunciation.

I feel that pronunciation is easier to me the. I relate it to the fact that sometimes asperger's values more the "shape" of things than the the idea itself, and the ability to mimic.

I'm talking about PRONUNCIATION, even though I feel the pronunciation easier, my communication skills are below average and I have to struggle to continue going to the classes.

Anyway, studying foreign languages is almost an obsession for me, I really like it.

Do someone feel the same? Could it be one thing that all AS could take advantage? Maybe you should try..

Most of my non-native language practices are with American Sign Language, so verbal skills weren't used. However, I did/do have a knack for picking up on the nuances in the signs faster than others around me. My teacher often noted that I had a natural aptitude and that the signs came quite naturally. I was able to pick up and use signs I had not been specifically taught after having seen them used only once. As you said, it is probably due to my skills at mimicry.

As for spoken languages, the learning of vocabulary and rules of pronunciation do come easily to me. It is also fairly easy for me to interpret the basic meaning of written languages with which I am not familiar.

I think we're less 'married' to our primary language quirks.
I took German, and as a hard of hearing person, you'd think it'd be harder for me to pick up the accent.
Yeah. My classmates were awful.

I also pick up accents when I'm around them too long, like when I visit my family in the south.

I'm learning Spanish right now and people always remark on how good my pronunciation is. I generally speak it with a conservative Latin-American accent, with Y and LL pronounced like the English consonantal Y, and Z and Soft C like S (not TH as in Spain).

According to Temple Grandin, verbal logic thinkers tend to do very well with learning foreign languages. Whether this translates into superior skills with pronounciation, I cannot say. I do know that I seem to pronounce words better in English and my French instructors told me that I pronounced French words very well (although being fairly minor in my verbal logic thinking, I don't learn French nearly as well as VL thinkers). I don't know if that's true for Japanese words, as I am learning through Rosetta Stone, but given the results in the speaking section, I think it might.

Autistics tend to have a love of precision, and that may help our pronounciation. I also think it may be the way we process language. As I recall, studies show that autistics tend to see words by the individual letters rather than the words themselves. As a result, we may not see words as being as foreign as others do.

Edit: Sorry, double post. I blame my internet connection.

Last edited by MrLoony on 26 Dec 2009, 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

I could pronounce things in foreign languages easily but not actually learn that language. I could just simply read it. I learned how to read Russian in just a few days time ( I know thats not as impressive as some of the other people on this site because someone learned it in 10 minutes or something like that but that is more of a savant ability to the extreme) and my friend knows that language and he says I am correct. I never took a real Russian language class all self taught. I did take a German class in college and once again, my pronunciation is much better than the rest of the class but any intellectual stuff is way beyond me. I could be wrong in this (for the German) because I know that the teacher hardly ever corrected me but I could have been saying everything incorrectly so I would have taken too much of his time. I think its because of my hyperlexia that I could pick up in reading other languages with ease.

haha, of my classmates in japanese 1-3 in high school, nobody had the accent down better than myself. then again, i was really into learning the language and loved doing the homework, whereas the rest of them didn't put much effort into the whole thing. my accent isn't uncanny, by any means (asian languages are tough to replicate since they are so different from western languages like german and english), but i was relatively good. better than most, anyway.

I've always noticed how hard it seemed for other people to replicate pronunciation of other languages properly, or to spell.

When I get asked how to spell something, there's a shape in my head, and I just start reading letters... odds are they're the right ones.

I once lost a spelling bee because the person asked me to spell "ehl-leh-goh-ree", with a significant Texas drawl, I hadn't yet picked up the word "allegory" at that point (think I was 7?), and they didn't pronounce the word with an "a" sound, so I spelled it as it was shaped in my head, e-l-l-e-g-o-r-y.

'Can you repeat the word?'
"ehl-leh-goh-ree"
'e-l-l-e-g-o-r-y, ellegory' (pronounced with a distinct 'eh' like they used)
"That is incorrect."


I stood there in shock trying to understand what happened while the girl after me got "fossil".

I'm learning Spanish also and found that I have an ability I never thought possible. The Y and LL you describe is the Central American way of saying them. In South America Y and LL is pronounced more like the English J.

So did I! I found out when I was 12 that I was very good at picking up languages. If I listen to a native speaker for long enough, I usually pick up the accent correctly. Mum thought it was werd though because I had a really good French accent just days after beginning to learn it. I was the only one in my German class who actually used a german accent. I too am good at picking up regional accents in the UK.



And she didn't spell it f-a-w-s-s-i-l? (Joke )

I have the ability to echo words and short phrases people tell me in foreign languages with a pronunciation that often makes them go
My free pronunciation isn't as good, but I realized that the Japanese and English sh-sounds are different from the German one (my native native language) by playing around with saying random words.
Korean is still pretty difficult to pronounce.

When I worked up in Ann Arbor, I would regularly go to a certain sushi bar. The sushi chefs there are actually Korean. There was one that I regularly chatted with. He was completely shocked when he heard me greet him one day in KOREAN. Of course, he was also shocked when around Christmas, he started singing in Korean, and I joined in in German.

Do you think that one factor is that if aspies tend to have difficulty communicating, even in their native language because of not getting NT nuances and social cues, they have been compensating by working incredibly hard at the bits they can get, i.e. the basic vocabulary and pronunciation?

If this is true, then it means these individuals are already used to really, really trying to listen, learn and replicate language, which would lead to someone who takes for granted the work involved in picking up a new language.

I ask this because I apparently have semantic pragmatic language disorder, which no one noticed for over 3 decades, I don't understand people most of the time, but yet when going abroad in a group, or meeting foreign people at home, I am the one in the group who tries the hardest to communicate with the foreigners, and am noticeably very good at basic communication, where the other party isn't trying to play head games.

I, too, have an exceptional talent for accents. I speak both French and Spanish fluently and people normally think that I am a native speaker from a different location. I am never identified as a native English speaker although English was the only language I spoke or studied until I was in my twenties. I learned both foreign languages living and working in different French and Spanish countries, not from studying outside of the environment.

By the way, I am not at all a verbal thinker. When I was young, my behavior was more that of classic autism. I was raised in a rural area and spent hours mimicking birds and animals and getting them to react. I was extraordinarily good at this, too, and believe that the two abilities are related.

It is also interesting that although it is often suggested that musical talent and language ability go together, I have no talent for music whatsoever.

I went to school with some Italians once and they liked for me to read out loud from Italian books because they said it sounded correct even though I didn't understand a word of it.