Functional echolalia in autism speech Verbal formulae and repeated prior utterances as communicative and cognitive strategies

Release time:2023-02-21  Hits:

• Impact Factor:4.426
• DOI number:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1010615
• Affiliation of Author(s):School of Foreign Languages,
• Teaching and Research Group:Department of English
• Journal:Frontiers in Psychology
• Place of Publication:Switzerland
• Key Words:Autism Spectrum Disorder, linguistic units, socio-communicative formulae, socio-cultural emblems, function, Elicitation
• Abstract:Echolalia, the echoing of prior speech, is a typical characteristic of autism (Kanner 1946; Prizant and Rydell 1984). Long considered meaningless repetition to be avoided, echolalia may in fact be used functionally in autism (Roberts 2014; Sterponi and Shankey 2014). This paper explores the functions of echolalia by children with autism. Based on two prior studies (Dornelas 2018; Pascual et al. 2017), we designed an elicitation task involving images of 12 professions (teacher) and 12 objects (birthday cake) commonly associated with given conventionalized expressions in Mandarin (e.g., “sheng ri kuai le!” ‘Happy birthday!’). Eight Chinese children with autism were asked to name and describe these images. All our participants produced a relatively high proportion of echolalia, mostly for naming, description, and topic development, a small percentage being used as conversation maintenance strategy or as cognitive strategy. This indicates that echolalia is often used communicatively in autism speech.
• Co-author:Todd Oakley
• First Author:xiefan
• Indexed by:Journal paper
• Correspondence Author:Esther Pascual
• Discipline:Literature
• Document Type:J
• Translation or Not:no
• Date of Publication:2023-02-21
• Included Journals:SSCI
• Links to published journals:https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1010615/full