Please talk to me about echolalia

[LimboLil]

Now that my little man has been diagnosed with ASD there are a million questions I want to ask! Starting with this. Echolalia. How do you say it for a start? Is it Echo-laylia or Echo-larlia. I really don't like this word!!!! Anyway, my son does this a fair bit. It is interspersed with normal speech. So, a lot of his speech is very direct and based around his needs and what he wants to do. When he is buzzing around, he does a fair amount of echoing books, sometimes bits from TV, lately from wii games though fortunately this has gone down a bit. So, is it a good or a bad thing? I have the more than words book which says it can be anxiety related or practising speech. Trouble is, he can get quite noisy with it too. In fairness, his speech sounds etc are MUCH clearer these days so he is obviously making progress. I'm just not sure what I should do about it, should I distract him away from it or let him get on with it? And if I am letting him get on with it, how many times do I remind him about noise level without going a bit crazy myself? He also has learning difficulties so his level of understanding can be questionable at times, though I do believe he has selective hearing on occasion too! God it's confusing. Please give me some advice! I guess what I want to know is will he grow out of it?

ps he is five.

My son had echolalia (most people use the first pronunciation by the way!) and it was part of his speech developing. Lovaas would say it is a positive thing hel;ping children regulate but you will find lots of conflicting evidence online. I don't know your son but I suspect you may have more problems if you try and suppress it. Good luck.

Thanks that is my gut feeling about it. Tbh it washes over my head I am so used to it and I can ask him questions etc and he will stop and answer and then carry on. I am noticing his speech so much clearer but hoping he grows out eventually. Once we are in a 'normal' situation I suddenly notice it much more, and then of course there is school .....

Ps did your son grow out of it?!

yes...kids do grow out of echolalia. it is great that he is echolalic as then you only need to re-channelise it for the correct usage of language. aba vb is helping us quite a lot with this....to be honest.

Oh thanks ladies I feel much better. It's mentioned in his reports but the reports are so factual, they never say if something is good or bad! He is doing it a lot this week, he is also singing a lot which is lovely :-)

I've been pronouncing it echo-lay-lia.
DS1 is now nearly 11 and very rarely does it these days, unless he is overexcited.

I meant DS2.

DS is 8 and his language is still 95 percent echolalia, it was said when he was 3 that it was a positive thing And I was told he would move on to proper language.
However even private salt sessions (lots of) havnt been able to move him on :(

Thanks Strong for a different perspective. I guess I will have to wait and see. I umm and ahh on a daily basis about whether we should use private salt or whether I would be wasting money.