Interactional and phonetic aspects of immediate echolalia in autism: A case study

Abstract

A case study is presented of an autistic boy aged 11 years. The analysis is based on audio-visual recordings made in both his home and school. The focus of the study is on that subset of immediate echolalia that has been referred to as pure echoing. Using an approach informed by conversation analysis and descriptive phonetics, distinctions are drawn between different forms of pure echo. It is argued that one of these forms, what we call 'unusual echoes', has distinctive interactional and phonetic properties which do not have a counterpart in the speech of non-autistic children. These principally consist of a particular segmental and suprasegmental relationship to the prior adult turn, a particular rhythmic timing and a functional opaqueness. This behaviour is set within the context of this child's general communicative behaviour which, in various ways, places a premium on the use of repetition skills. These skills also inform the child's use of repetition in unusual echoes. though here the interactional and phonetic properties of such repetitions suggest that they display a distinct interactional stance to the questions that precede them.

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“…Instead, the current Speaker designs the prosodic shape of the tum by reference to the prosodic shape of the preceding speaker's talk. If this finding is borne out by future research, it has quite radical implications for the modeling of prosodic features in applications such as automatic speech recognition and dialogue Systems; and for understanding how children develop use of prosody (Wells, 2010), including atypical development such as the immediate and delayed echolalia found in cases of low-functioning autism (Local & Wootton, 1995). It may also have implications for how intonation is taught to second language learners.…”

‘The words are stuck inside me; I write to heal’: Memory, recall, and repetition in PTSD blogs

“…In the field of autism is work by Solomon (2011) that has addressed the pragmatic concerns of communication with people with this condition. also in this domain is scholarship by Loca and Wootton (1995), who call attention to even the most functionally opaque form of repetition. They refer to this as 'unusual echolalia' , and state that this feature is not as meaningless as it seems, and that it demonstrates particular linguistic and prosodic traits that happen in response to specific interactional moves.…”

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“…Вдобавок к этому, в другом исследова нии было замечено, что каждая фраза упо требляется ребенком только в определен ном контексте. Отсроченная эхолалия мо жет также служить другим целям, таким как смена темы на более интересную для ребенка и попытка занять позицию власти [35]. Что касается мгновенной эхолалии, то, как было предположено Violette и Swisher [62], она тоже применяется в опре деленных ситуациях: когда ребенок слы шит незнакомые слова, произнесенные ди рективным тоном.…”