is this a form of echolalia?

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My son doesn't repeat what I say verbatim but what he does is re-word what I say constantly right after I say them. Is this a form of echolalia? It sure does sound like it to me. For example, he's drinking a bottle of water, I told him, "after you're done, close it" just as a reminder to him because I don't want him to spill the water, he'll be so preoccupied with watching tv that he'll forget to do the obvious. Right after I told him to put the cap on, he says, "close it with the cap?"

NT kids do NOT do this. If I told my daughter to put the cap on the bottle of water, she'll either say "ok" or ignore me. He ALWAYS questions me right after I say something. It's not exactly what I said, but he'll put his own spin on it. Another example is, I'll say.."do you want some cake?" He'll say, "the chocolate cake right there?" EVEN THOUGH the cake is right in his face, there's NO OTHER CAKE! The reason I think it's a form of echolalia is because what he says does not serve a purpose. It doesn't clarify what cake it is or which cap it is because the answer is obvious. It's like he does it for his own purpose of processing what I just said, combined with the joy he gets when I confirmed that he was right, usually I say, "yes Devon, that cake."

Is anyone's child like mine?

That's me.

No use getting frustrated about it though!

Honestly, it CAN be a little frustrating at times because I KNOW he knows the answer, I'm sure there are a lot of things that are frustrating about me as well. Overall though, I'm happy he is at least responding and understanding me, which is huge compared to how he was a year ago. At least he's not ignoring me! I was doing a little research and there is a third type of echolalia called "migitated echolalia." I believe this is what it is.

It could be that he really does want to clarify what you told him to do to make sure he understands what's expected of him. I think I do the same thing sometimes, especially at work. Sometimes I'll think "why did I just ask that question?" right after, but it's still probably better to ask unneccesary questions than to be confused.

Yeah, he might not actually be sure, LOL. A lot of the time I wonder if I'm missing something, and sometimes end up asking questions like that, but not as often as it sounds like he does. Because, you know, maybe there IS another cake for some reason. It could be in the fridge, who knows? Sometimes it seems like there might be more than one answer even when it should be obvious there isn't, and for some reason it can be hard to narrow down the possibilities in a timely fashion. But maybe you could eventually train him to think for a minute and recognize when the questions aren't necessary.