Simply put echolalia is repeating or “echoing” what another person has said.
Echolalia is a characteristic frequently associated with Autism and researchers have found that up to 85% of people with autism, who are verbal, display echolalia of some form. However, Echolalia is a part of typical language development and normally begins at the age of 18 months of age and declines significantly by the age of three. In children with autism, echolalia occurs with greater frequency and lasts for a longer period of time than it does in children with typical language development.
Over the years I was always very concerned about my autistic son’s echolalia, because echolalia was always presented to me by professionals as something that was undesirable, bad and negative, that should be eliminated.
One day, I just stopped and for the first time I thought, hang on instead of allowing all these opinions and theories from professionals to run wild inside my head, causing me to mentally beat myself up and judge his echolalia as bad, why don´t I just ask him why he does it. I´m like well DAH Zobeeda, why didn´t you do that before?
So I finally asked my son Tobias, now 17 years old, why he was repeating what they were saying in the film he is watching.
And to my great surprise this is what my son told me:
- ´I enjoy talking´
- ´I need to practice talking and learn it by myself´.
- ´I need to practice reading´ from a young age, my son always put the English subtitles on whilst watching a DVD, as his father who is Danish did the same thing, even though his father was fluent in English. My son whilst watching reads the subtitles at the same time, as he is repeating what the actors or people are saying on the DVD.
I was completely stunned, I really was, but it also made perfect sense what he was saying. Many people who want to learn English as a second language frequently watch lots of films and programmes in English and try to mimic and copy what they hear, that’s how many of them learn English, but when they do that, it’s called learning not echolalia.
I can now see from an autistic persons view, with the TV they get to learn but without the social challenges of speaking to a person face to face or being ridiculed for their efforts, I know my son has been teased about the way he speaks because he finds it challenging and he often sounds a lot younger.
I have to say what he told me was such a revelation and such a surprise. My son frequently rewinds the same part of a scene he really finds funny and changes the audio language and listens to the same phrase in different languages, he will then rewind the same part and watch it in English many times but changing the subtitles language instead, so he can see how you write that phrase in different languages and he is able to translate these skills appropriately to real life situations. For e.g. I did not know how to say sorry in Spanish, I learned it from my son band he was able to use it in the right situation, one time we were playing scrabble and he beat me by creating a French word that I could not remember the meaning of even though I studied French for 5 years, I asked him what it meant, I looked it up and he was correct. I found a piece of paper, where he had written 2 sentences, I thought it was Spanish, he said to me, no it´s Portuguese actually.
So please do not become so concerned and afraid of the Echolalia, whilst in the past professionals saw it as something that must be eliminated. Researchers and professionals are beginning to realize it does serve some purpose for people with Autism. Just look at what my son says and does, a professional and researcher can theorize and speculate all they want but YOU CANNOT BEAT HEARING IT FROM THE HORSES MOUTH. If your child is not very verbal but there is a lot of echolalia also remember the mouth has muscles, so even if they keep repeating dialogue they are working the muscles in the mouth that create words, they are also getting auditory feedback, and as I said in my other blog posts, people often speak very little or not at all to autistic children/adults who are nonverbal or have limited speech, so I can understand why they would speak to themselves or repeat dialogues.
