Echolalia - Blog Posts

man i love echolalia-ing my sister's verbal stims. we communicating. vibin like a pair of slugcats

this came to my attention because lately ive been taking more videos of myself and i realized in almost all (if not all) im making really weird noises or saying something from a song/show and i just find it really entertaining cause i don’t even realize its going on

people don’t talk about vocal stimming enough, in my opinion. haha like vocal stimming is the best. i always have to do it alone cause it usually annoys my family, but still i just love to just go and “aaaaaaaaAAAAaaAaAaaAaa” it’s somehow so refreshing

people don’t talk about vocal stimming enough, in my opinion. haha like vocal stimming is the best. i always have to do it alone cause it usually annoys my family, but still i just love to just go and “aaaaaaaaAAAAaaAaAaaAaa” it’s somehow so refreshing

i feel like tumblr has kind of changed the meaning of the word "echolalia" into something that can be more precisely described with "vocal stimming." people on here use echolalia to mean "repeating a word or phrase over and over because it feels good" which fits the definition of vocal stimming. that's the established term for doing that; echolalia usually means something else.

the classic meaning of echolalia isn't repeating a word that sounds good, but is actually a conversational pattern where one person repeats the last thing that got said. for example, someone might say to me, "i'll bring you the rest of the articles tomorrow" and i'll reply back "articles tomorrow." it could also be just repeating yourself after you've finished talking, like i'll say a sentence, think i'm done, then catch myself repeating the last few words of the sentence.

i also do this in ASL, so it isn't just about the mouth-feel of the words. also the words don't necessarily have to be particularly pleasing or stand out in any way. when i do it, i'm not even really trying to communicate anything, it's just how i process language. that's different from vocal stimming, which is when a word is so pleasing to say that you say it over and over again.

the reason i care about this distinction is that echolalia is a majorly stigmatized feature of autism (though it also occurs in other neurodevelopmental conditions that affect language). it's often seen as a sign that an autistic person is "low functioning" or as something to be trained out through ABA. i've never met another autistic adult with echolalia, and when i do it, it confuses the hell out of whoever i'm talking to unless they know about it as an autistic thing. i just hope that other autistic people with echolalia know that they aren't the only one who does this, and it isn't anything to be ashamed of

echolalia??..... you mean the lil parappa in my brain

I am here to admit…

I never recovered from haz cheeseburger. I still say hewwow to ppl I know. 😔

… I also haven’t recovered from pop cat

Anyone else have a mind pop that got old like ten years ago? So tired of my brain going

“I have a face”

Over and over.