What is Echolalia and Its Relation to Autism?

Hey, guys, this is Ming here, speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com today. Our topic is echolalia. And echolalia is something that parents are always very scared about because echolalia means autism, but it actually isn't. Actually, if your child echoes, it's a part of their language development. It's a part of how they acquire language. And in fact, typically developing children use it as a way to imitate us and learn language practice and so on, so forth. Yes. Actually, echolalia sometimes can be associated with autism, and we'll talk about it in a bit. And it can also occur in different kind of disorders such as Tourette's syndrome, where these are verbal tics. Okay. And there are two types of echolalia. Number one is immediate echolalia. The second one is delayed echolalia. The first one, immediate echolalia, means your child immediately echoes what you just said. Okay. People would describe the children as parrots if your child has this immediate echolalia, which begs the question of whether the child actually understands you or they're just basically saying back the same sound to you. Right. That's why it's better to teach children with gestures in the beginning. Because if a child can use their gestures as a way to initiate communication, then it would be much easier for us to know whether they know the word or not. If they're signing it correctly, pointing to the correct things and so on, accompanying with the sounds. Okay. Then it will be much easier for us to actually understand. All right. So this is also common when a child has verbal tics, those who are on with Tourette syndrome. And I've seen it when I was a child, there was a kid on my school bus who had Tourette's. And every time that I said something or we said something, he would say it one more time in a, in a lower voice that he knows he's doing it, but he's trying to suppress it. And when he's saying it softly, it's like as if he's rehearsing it or something. Right. And we didn't find it very strange, to be honest. No one bullied him or anything about it. But it does happen to children outside of the spectrum. And even typically developing children do have it. You know, if you have ever seen, like a three year old who can speak very well, if you say something, they tend to catch on to what you're saying very quickly. And that's because they've been like practicing by imitating you. Right. Okay, let's talk about delayed echolalia and this is something, what a lot of people call scripting, right? Remembering something from a few minutes back or a day before or maybe like two weeks before where they've seen something very interesting, it's very funny as a video or a YouTube video, whatever, and they learned it, and now they are rehearsing it and scripting it as if they're trying to remember and rehearse it. Right? So all these immediate and delayed echolalia, they do happen with typically developing children. All right? Or else why would a lot of children like Peppa Pig, you know, that's actually delayed echolalia if they're reciting something from YouTube. Right. So the problem is that is it something that is destructive or socially acceptable or not? Okay. So if it's something that is socially unacceptable, meaning it's getting annoying, it's not something that should be doing at that point in time, then yeah, maybe we should intervene. Okay. But otherwise it helps language acquisition. Okay. Echolalia is something that is argued to help. Okay. Verbal imitation is a pre linguistic skill. When we're learning a new language, the first things we do is to imitate what our teachers say. Okay? And the same goes to learning music, learning whatever. Learning a new skill is always imitation first. Okay? But you have to understand that if it's socially acceptable or not, if it's socially unacceptable, it might be what we call verbal stimming, which is something that autistic people do. And that stimming in itself can be a whole new video. If you want to know more about it, you can comment below. And actually, stimming isn't something that we should stop necessarily. It's something that we all do. But we stim in different ways. For instance, I. I would shake my leg as a way of stimming, stimulating myself in a way that calms you down. Or, you know, it's just something that I do. Right? And that's what autistic people will tell you. That's just something we do. We verbal stim, we script back those things and it makes us feel better. And people might argue, is it a coping mechanism? Because sometimes when it's stimming, echoing might be something that soothes or calms down autistic person or anyone, to be honest. And whilst this happened, it's not always the case. So you have to get down to the why of stimming. Right. And a very good example of this is a Korean drama. I don't know how, if you watched it. It's been quite popular at the time of this recording. It's called Moving to Heaven. And the main character is an autistic boy who does like, who cleans up the apartment or the house of someone who has passed away. And whenever he feels stressed, he keeps banging his head and then recites some sort of thing from a book. And that is verbal stimming in itself, right? That is echolalia. And not everyone is like that. Not every autistic person is like that and realize. But it gives you a gist of how it should look like and at the very least in a fictional sense. So if you have any more questions, you can comment in the comment section below. And we also have a Facebook group with over 5,000 people inside. Also put the link there down below in the description. And if you haven't, you should get our checklist for home therapy. It's a list of just tools and toys that we recommend parents to get if you're looking to start home therapy right now. Okay, so that's it for this video. Let me know how it was and I'll see you in the next one. Bye. Bye.