Echolalia - tell me your experiences, I'm not sure that that is what this is.

[CrunchyFrog]

Or a title that makes actual grammatical sense.

DS1 copies immediately, especially an instruction. He rarely repeats the phrase again, although sometimes will mutter an oft-heard instruction while doing an everyday task.

He doesn't directly parrot the TV exactly, but will say "The Doctor says... yada yada" and this could occur at any time, out of context. (It is usually the Doctor, he and I share that particular strong interest. )

When he is doing the repetition, he will often use what he calls a funny voice - I am very concerned that someone is going to lamp him for taking the piss, tbh!

It is a newish behaviour, last 6 months or so, co-inciding with a big improvement in speech and socialising, and is becoming more pronounced.

What do you think? What is your experience of echolalia?

DS1 started off on the endless repetition of a single phrase to start with and now has moved on to very similar behaviours to your DS, it's still classed as echolalia in him if that helps?

My asd ds often repeats just the last word or two of anything said to him, whether it's an instruction or something else. e.g. me "where did you put your shoes pet?" ds "shoes pet". He also uses swathes of dialogue from his favourite tv programme (Fireman Sam at the moment). And then again, as a family we do this thing now where someone will say "whose boy are you, ds?" and he replies "mummy's boy", We then can go round the room with everyone asking him whose boy he is, and he'll always reply "daddy's boy, granny's boy, auntie maggie's boy" - you get the idea! Apparently this is all echolalia in slightly differing forms

Do you think its just stimming? My son has lots of verbal stims.

He sings constantly sometimes in a weird voice but if we ask him to use his nice voice he will immediately change it and sing properly.

He does an odd blowing thing, and makes t t t sounds, that I thought were either stimming or tics. Seeing the specialist SALT in September so hopefully she'll be able to answer some questions, I feel a little abandoned at the moment!

My DS does similar stuff. He started with just repeating things; as his language improved he still has some favourite phrases he repeats, but now he picks up bits and then changes them according to what he wants to say, as I think your DS is doing.
The vocal stims are different I think, because (like yours) are more sounds that he enjoys making. The echolalia is more like an attempt at communication.
I think on the whole it's positive, because they're moving on from just repeating the sentence, for functional purposes, to breaking it up into bits, where one bit is picked up whole, but the rest is put together by them, iyswim