Echolalia is one of the fun new words that has entered our vocabulary in the recent past. Merriam-Webster defines it as “The often pathological repetition of what is said by other people as if echoing them.” Of course, an echo happens when you talk and then hear your own words bouncing off of walls, or coming back at you from inside a cave. Echolalia is when someone else echoes what you say to an exponential degree. For the longest time, this is how Matt-Man talked, and still to this day his speech is very much echoing word-for-word the things we say. It’s like he is a cave, and when we speak to him, our words bounce right back.
In general, this is how all people learn to talk. No one learns language in a vacuum. We all learn by hearing, making sense of what we hear, and then appropriating those words, repeating what we've heard. Evangeline and I were always in competition with one another trying to get our kids to say Mama or Dada first. We did this by saying Mama or Dada repeatedly until they could mimic what we said.
Our 8-year old, of course, takes full advantage of this, teaching his baby brother words like poop, toot, and vomit. And if the public schools today are anything like they were in my day, our kids will soon be bringing home a whole new colorful French vocabulary.
While all children learn to talk by repeating what others say, children like Matt-Man who are verbal are prone to echo to an obsessive degree. At one point, we would encourage his speech by saying, “Matt-Man, say ‘Mommy’”. He would respond with the exact same phrase, word-for-word.
“Hey Matt-Man, let’s go for a walk.”
“Matt-Man, it’s time for a bath.”
“Hey, you need to go potty.”
All of these and more would receive the same “echolalic” response. Again, all kids learn to speak by repeating words they heard from someone else. Yet at some point, kids take their corpus of words and make it their own. They begin to use those words in a context that makes sense and can respond appropriately to questions when asked. I could have a conversation with my older son when he was 2. Granted, it was a very basic conversation, usually about what was for lunch or Sesame Street, but he had taken the words he learned and used them to have a meaningful dialogue with me. This is hard to come by for children like Matt-Man.
Hard to come by, but the amazing thing is that while they are prone to Echolalia, they have an ability to adapt their mimicking speech to the context they are in. Much of Matthew’s speech is still imitation, but increasingly his repetition either answers a question or informs us about something that happened in his day.
One day when he was about 4, on the car ride home from school Matthew said, “We’re going to take a walk.” The next day it was, “You can’t have M&Ms until you do your independent work.” And the next day was something different. When we talked to his teacher, she said, “That’s how he’s telling you about his day.”
By repeating verbatim "We're going to take a walk," he was telling us that on that day, he and his classmates went on a walk. And the next day, he was telling us that his work was rewarded by M&Ms. He still does this. Periodically, he gets off the bus and tells us, “You need to go think.” His teacher has a time-out chair in the classroom where students who make a bad choice have to go and think about what they’ve done. “You need to go think,” is Matthew’s way of tattling on himself!
Other verbal children with Autism do something similar. I met a woman whose brother (in his 20s) loves movies and has memorized movie lines. That is how he communicates. If he is asked a direct question, he quotes The Dark Knight as a way of answering the question. Beyond being a clinical example of Echolalia, this is his way of adapting his language in a way that can communicate with others.
All of us learn the same way: hearing, making sense of what was heard, and making those words our own. Children like Matt-Man do this to an excessive degree. At first glance, it seems like Echolalia is senseless babbling, but it is simply their way of communicating. These children are impressively skilled at being able to adapt their speech into a form of active and direct communication with others. It isn’t that they can’t communicate, but they have learned to use their language skills in a way that makes sense to them. Now all we have to do is learn their language.
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