Echolalia Part 1

Hi guys! 

My name is Allie and I am the newest member of the Family Chatterbox team!   

Today I am going to talk about a way some children process and learn language called echolalia.  Echolalia is when a child repeats back whatever is said to them.  Echolalia is a language characteristic commonly associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but can occur for other reasons too!  Echolalia comes in two forms—Immediate Echolalia where a child directly repeats back what is said to them in the moment.  For example, if you asked a child who uses immediate echolalia “how are you doing?” They might reply right back with “how are you doing?”instead of attempting to answer your question. The other form of echolalia is called delayed echolalia (which is also often referred to as scripting).  This is when a child repeats verbalizations that he/she heard previously elsewhere, often from favorite tv shows, movies, books, etc.  An example of this might be if your child frequently repeats various lines from Toy Story throughout his/her day.   

I recently read a great book that I want to share with you all—Natural Language Acquisition on the Autism Spectrum (The Journey from Echolalia to Self-Generated Language) by Marge Blanc.  This book does an amazing job of  laying out how children with ASD and who exhibit echolalia tend to learn language in larger chunks first.  I would definitely recommend it to any parents who have a child who uses echolalia! 

According to Blanc’s book, these children  tend to learn full rote/memorized phrases or sentences before understanding the individual  words within a phrase.  

Here’s an example of how this might look; if a child repeatedly says “Okay time to get dressed!” (Since this is something he has heard frequently before) he: 

• Most likely does not always directly mean this message verbatim, rather he might be generalizing its usage to a number of situations.  For example, he might say this every time he leaves the house/goes in the car to communicate that it’s time for a transition.  For children who speak in rote/memorized phrases like these throughout their day, it’s important to interpret their meaning in the context they use it and not necessarily take take their phrases literally. 
• Is not likely to fully understand the meaning or be able to directly use the individual words within this phrase.  For example, even though the word “time” is in this phrase that he says frequently, he most likely would not be able to use this word in a novel (non-rote/memorized) context such as asking/answering a question related to time or constructing a novel phrase using the word “time.” 

So in summary, children who use echolalia tend to learn in large chunks first (whole phrases/sentences) before learning to the meaning of individual words in their phrases.  They also tend to overgeneralize these rote phrases to a number of contexts so it’s important to interpret these phrases and not take them literally. 

In my next blog post I’ll be going into more depth about some specific strategies you can use as parents for fostering expressive language for your child who uses echolalia! 

-Allie-