echolalia driving me nuts :(

[chocjunkie]

DD (3.4) has severe s&l disorder (+asd traits; no formal dx yet).

for the last couple of month her echolalia/repetitive has become really bad. she is hardly playing anymore and spends a lot of her time just sitting by the window or so and producing unintelligible jargon/repetitive speech & all kind of noises. her s&l development seems to have stalled atm

quite ashamed to say it but this constant echolalia (or whatever it is) is really starting to drive me up the wall .

we don't get salt atm so haven't got anybody to ask about.

how do you deal with this? is there any way to turn this into something productive?

any advice greatly appreciated!

Oh Gosh Choc
I know exactly how you're feeling; my 2 boys have Fragile X syndrome and one of the traits is echolalia and pallialia
You know already what echo-echo echolalia is but palilalia is when they repeat things...in younger sons case 1000s of times literally. Drives me bloody mental.
E.g booked a hol in Jan to go in May just gone. Didn't tell him but he picked up on it and never stopped talking about it for that whole time...what time we going? going in the morning about half past 2? who's driving? what time we get there? get there half past 2? and so on...I wouldn't like to count how many times but if i had a pound for each time I would be a multi millionaire!!!
(half past 2 is everything, he has no concept of time)
He constantly asks the time so i bought him a talking watch at Christmas. He presses this button and this female voice says quite clearly whatever the time is. Sooo when he kept asking I said what does your watch say...so he'd press this button and she'd say for example "The time is 3 minutes past 9am" and I'd say "so what's the time then?" and he'd say "Half past 2"!!!!

Don't have any answers I'm afraid except to distract, or if she keep asking things, only answer her once or twice and then just repeat i have answered that question.
Of course you will be saying 'I have answered that question' about a 1000 times an hour but...

Elder son repeats whole conversations he's hear don telly, so if he watches say Power rangers (which he does constantly!) he'll have these funny little two way convo's repeating whatever they've said...and adds a few of his own too. E.g.
what's your name?
why what's yours?
I'm not telling you?
I'll tell my dad
I don't care
f*ck off then
Oh you swored, I'm telling my dad
I don't care....

and so it goes on, usually at 3am!!!
Other than that you can just try to ignore it as much as you can.
usually with younger DS it's cos he's anxious and doesn't know where he's meant to be at in the universe and where is his space and time...

been through this with hours a day of telly talk from DS at this age, fortunately it decreased as his language increased. It is maddening (and I found it heartbreaking, as he couldn't string sentences together other than mindless repeats from telly scripts). In terms of turning into something productive - it's possible either to distract with a motivating activity or to try and break in to the convo - so if she's talking about Dora having a red dress, you say, Dora has red shoes too (detailed description of how to do this in a book called giggle time I got from the library about developmental problems).

Hello chocjunkie
My son has echolia and it used to drive me up the wall too. He'd be particularly bad when he was tired. I now think that echoalia is a good sign - they're trying to communicate but lack the ability to take a conversation anywhere, so it's up to the adult to move things on. Ds is delighted if he can get anyone to engage in one of his silly noise conversations (he says 'boah!', the other child says 'boah!' back and so on ad infinitum) but real conversations, like 'where did you go this morning?' are much harder work for him. Like Unpa I think it's best to respond/acknowledge once and then move things on to another topic. Ds is my first child so I didn't have a clue about normal language development. Observing 2yo dd I see that they just chat about the most mundane stuff, so I try to do that with ds 'oh look out the window, there's a yellow car in the street. Do you like yellow cars?' 'I'm hot, I'm going to have a drink, would you like a drink?'

I hope you get some help and proper advice soon. We've consulted a (private) ABA lady who has been a great help in advising on our main bug bears, including echoalia.

Constant distraction is the only thing that pulls DS2 away from repeating something over and over. Only problem is then he is obsessed with the distraction and wants THAT over and over. Trading one for another, sometimes, I suppose!