It is sometimes uncanny situation when the child you are handling is echoing all the words that you said. It surprises all the time to hear the sentences that I have said to the child few days ago and he is saying it back to me now. It is so random and sporadic that I just have to let him speak and not interrupt when he is in “moment”. This manifest when he zones out for few seconds and then he would blabber these sentences and then he calms down.
What is Echolalia? It is a repetitive use of phrase or words. It is prevalent to children with disability most especially children with autism. It is normal language development, which begins around 18 months of age when a child has mastered imitating words or phrases and declines when the child turns to 3 years old.
Echolalia is actually a good thing for a child. It means that the child with Echolalia has the language skill and yet lacks the expressive labels of things he likes to do, want and feeling. This means the child fills the lack of expressive things on his mind with the first available label he can grasp of, which he can overly used unless intervention is given. For a child with autism, they repeat what was being said without really processing or understanding the meaning of what was said.
Echolalia is actually not a bad thing, because this means that the child’s language skills in term of pronunciation and enunciation is excellent, he just needs to be taught the expressive labels to fill the void. When this is addressed, then the child with Echolalia will have the wide of labels repertoire and Echolalia is lessened or eliminated.
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