Originally Posted by Portia
Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
Yeah-- oddly, my DD has never been a read-aloud kid, either. I know exactly what you mean about not having an auditory beacon to follow!! She did the echolalia-like thing, too-- from everything around her-- movies, TV, radio, conversations. It was really creepy, but there was something about her intonation that would "shift" slightly when she was using whole chunks from elsewhere. I always knew-- but I was the only one who knew that it was 'borrowed' content that she was trying out. She usually managed to place it completely appropriately contextually, so people other than me didn't understand that she was quoting Emeril rather than making it up as she went. It wasn't exactly echolalia, either, because as noted, she was using it IN context. It was almost like a word-acquisition skill on steroids. She acquired whole phrases or paragraphs and used them. It gradually stopped when she was about five or six.

Wow Howler! DS did this too! I was the only one that understood from where everything came. The echolalia was one of the things they used to diagnose ASD for DS. They said it was not how "typical" children acquired language. The more I am on this board, the more I wonder about that Dx.

DS did this too, but much younger, when he was first learning to talk. He had a delightful phase when he could talk in reasonably standard 4-5 word telegraphic sentences - or in fluent paragraphs from Thomas the Tank Engine. (He'd cut them about, change names etc. to fit his context, but clearly couldn't yet come up with anything like that level of language "from whole cloth".)

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