Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Articles
INTRODUCTION
Echolalia, broadly defined as the repetition of the speech of others, is one of the defining features of autism spectrum disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) and one that has been noted since the first description of childhood autism by Kanner (1943).
Autism echolalia has been associated with sameness, an inward orientation, and a limited repertoire of communicative actions. Although Kanner acknowledged that echolalia was sometimes used functionally, to offer an affirmative response to the interlocutor, his overall characterization was that it is a dysfunctional phenomenon, governed rigidly and obsessively by asocial preoccupations (Kanner, 1943; see also Carluccio, Sours & Kalb, 1964; Rutter, 1978).
The present study offers a contextualized examination of autism echolalia, via a fine-grained analysis of the interactional matrix of echolalic behavior. Our investigation augments functional descriptions of echolalia by considering the linguistic environments in which echoes are used to achieve interactional outcomes. We illuminate the ways in which the autistic child uses echoes to respond systematically and in an orderly way to specific courses of action, as well as how others respond to echoes within those different interactional sequences.
Echolalic behaviors are usually separated into two categories on the basis of the temporal latency between the original utterance and its subsequent repetition (Prizant, 1983; Schuler, 1979). Immediate echolalia 'refers to utterances produced immediately following or a brief time after the production of a model utterance', whereas delayed echoes are 'utterances repeated at a significantly later time' (Prizant, 1983: 297). Although two different mnemonic processes have been implicated in the two types of echolalia (i.e., short-term echoic memory for immediate echolalia and long-term memory for delayed echolalia; Fay, 1983), both behaviors have been traditionally considered as lacking comprehension of the repeated utterance and as devoid of communicative intent.
Early research on echolalia developed along two main strands. One aimed to discriminate autism echolalia from other forms of echolalia, including so-called normal or developmental echolalia; the second analyzed the echoic behavior of children with autism in terms of its meaning and function to the child. The first strand of research indicated that the frequency of echolalia in the speech of children with autism is greater than in children with mental retardation or dysphasia, or in those...