POLL: Do/did you have echolia?

Post Reply New Topic

Do you have echolalia currently, did you only have it as a child or have you never had it?

I only had it before the age of 5.

Yes. I've had echolalia pretty much my whole life.

I used to experience this. I'm not quite sure when it went away, though. I think it kind of faded away sometime in middle school or high school.

I have palilalia, which is basically the same thing as echolalia except I echo my own words instead of other people's.

I definitely had echolalia as a child. I remember driving a roommate up the wall at 18 with my constant repetition of lines (imitating voices as well) from Saturday Night Live. I still do echolalia-like things (like I start reading out loud, repeating other people, quoting things) but I am not sure that this qualifies, even if I can have entire conversations in Buffy quotes.

I have palilalia, which was the first thing I ever noticed that made me wonder if I was autistic.

Not immediate echolalia. I'll repeat things sometimes, though, later on. I just kind of store them as strings of sounds and spit them back out. I used to do entire conversations that way when I was very small--for the life of me, I have no idea how I managed to memorize all that stuff. I'm a lot more sophisticated and original in conversation nowadays.

I don't remember doing that when I was a kid. I hardly remember speaking at all, though.

If my brain is completely frazzled/fried (overloaded), and someone's talking in my face and it sounds like a lot of wah-wah nonsense, there is an urge to mimic back at the person. I usually refrain, though.

As far as things like the microwave beeper, or my cat, iPod alarms, and jingles on TV, I do tend to parrot those back. Not sure if that counts as echolalia. And, also movie & TV lines, as others have said. And sometimes, randomly, complicated chemical names. I.e. "para amino benzoic acid" "chloro methyl phenyl triazolo benzodiazepine." (As a kid I was really good at figuring out how to pronounce complicated, new words.)

A bit OT: I've wondered if the ability to 'absorb' the aesthetic of something is an autistic-specific strength. Like, an accent, the way someone moves, or even the 'character' that inanimate objects can have; and even the 'shape' of calculus, and logic, and such.

I had palilalia as a child. My mind would get stuck in a loop where I could only repeat the last word I'd said over and over and over again. It went away sometime between middle school and high school, thankfully.