Aspies For Freedom

I was called "Little Miss Echo" until I was about ten, when the phenomenon started to lose its complete hold on me all on its own.

The thing is I have no idea whatever why I behaved like this, as though I can't access whatever memories are associated with it.

I would also sometimes repeat - for hours and days at a time - words and phrases that had and have no meaning that I know of.

I can remember one of these - "Wring you hands in green delight" - which I repeated for so long and so often that my father would spank me to make me stop - which I would for as long as I could remember not to do it.

Phrases taken from films and then grafted endlessly into my speech were another part of the phenomenon.

Echolalia  has stayed with me all my life, but in more muted and restrained form as I've grown older. .  I think it is some sort of process, though of what I do not know.  :?

So that's my experience of echolalia, Gwyn,  :roll:  I had the impression that it was a key diagnostic feature of Kanner's autistic psychopathy during the Cold War.

Stella.

One of the residents in the nursing home where I work does something like that, which leads me to wonder if anything else can cause it. She's got some other physical problems (doesn't walk or feed herself), but she makes eye contact and seems NT, except that she doesn't like to be touched. And she doesn't talk except to repeat phrases over and over. "Down to the end of the hall" and "if the shoe fits" are the two that I've heard from her.

I don't have any medical information about her, and I don't deal with her regularly enough to know much about her, so I can't add much other than the fact that AS may not be the only thing that causes echolalia.

That'd make sense. I hadn't thought of that.

I used to have a major problem with eye contact until I was about 15 years old. Now the only person that I can't really make eye contact with is my father.