Language Impairment

Doing the stuttering simulation was surprisingly one of the hardest. When doing the wheelchair or the blind masks, people knew you have a disability, where as the stuttering you just looked "normal" and people would stare when you opened your mouth. I did a similar activity to this in high school. I was taking ASL and we had to pretend that we were deaf for the whole day so we could see how difficult that would be. This simulation reminded me a lot of that. When my husband and I went to order food at a restaurant and I stuttered, it was like the cashier person didn't know how to respond. She kept asking me to repeat things which made it that much more frustrating. At the begging of this semester my husband and I moved to a new apartment. We had to sell our previous contract and the guy who bought it had a language impairment. When talking to him he had a large stutter, and he would take a few seconds to thing about what he wanted to say, and he had a loss for words a lot. Being in SPED 310, I know how frustrating and hard it can be to have a language impairment and so I was being very polite towards him and I wasn't getting frustrating. I could tell that he was embarrassed by his disability and that he was getting frustrated. I felt so bad for him because I know that those who aren't informed about language disabilities will judge him or even make fun of him. While doing this simulation I was thinking about the boy who bought our apartment. You could tell then whenever I would talk to someone they would get annoyed because they couldn't fully understand what I was saying.

Doing this simulation was probably the biggest eye opener for me. The other simulations were difficult, don't get me wrong, but having a language disability doesn't make you look like you have a disability on the outside. Disabilities in now way should every define a person, but I feel like when you are in a wheel chair or blind people feel bad for you and have respect for you but with a language impairment I didn't really feel like this. I felt like people were judging me and looking at me like I was stupid. I have gained so much respect for those who have language impairments because I have seen a little glimpse at how frustrating it can be to keep repeating yourself or having people constantly saying "what???".