LANGUAGE IN INDIA

A STUDY OF ECHOLALIA IN MALAYALAM SPEAKING AUTISTIC CHILDREN

Shyamala Chengappa, Ph.D. (Speech and Hearing)
Asha V. P., M.Sc. (Speech and Hearing)
Shilpashri H. N., M.Sc. (Speech and Hearing)

ON AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is a set of complex neurological disorders that affect individuals in the areas of social interaction and communication. These children commonly exhibit disorders of speech and language development, which is considered to be one of the core deficits. A lot of research has gone into the study of linguistic form, function and use in autistic population in the recent time. One can find very conspicuous delay in the onset of speech that is initially seen as mutism; later few of them gradually tend to develop speech which may/may not be functional. Speech that develops may show abnormalities of voice, prosody, articulation, pronominal reversal, atypical vocabulary development, morphosyntactic and pragmatic errors. Clinical observation of speech characteristics in autistic children revealed errors like staccato speech, monotonous speech, inappropriate questioning [Fay & Schuler, 1980; Baltaxe & Simmon (1985)]. Apart from these errors the most commonly and generally seen error is echolalia, which refers to repetition of heard speech.

FAILURE TO RESPOND

Failure to respond is one of the earliest signs of communication failure. The echolalic feature in the speech of autistic children is said to be mainly due to a comprehension deficit. Schuler and Prizant (1985) concluded from their study that echolalia is the net result of limited communicative competence and normal speech skill. Besides, they fail to have the continued awareness of the nature of the relationship with other speakers and his/her state of mind. It could also be serving as self stimulatory kind of behavior as they derive pleasure out of it.

STUDY OF ECHOLALIA

Study of echolalia in autistics has been a much cited topic. It is the most frequently mentioned language related characteristic of verbal autistics. Kanner (1943) identified echolalic behavior in all eight of his original clients who had acquired some speech or language (3 were described as mute). Bartak, Rutter and Cox (1975) found a history of echolalic behavior in all 19 (100%) of their autistic subjects who had acquired speech. Baltaxe and Simmons (1981) estimated that a minimum of 75% of autistic individuals who speak are echolalic or had been echolalic for extended period in development.

TWO GENERAL CATEGORIES OF ECHOLALIA

Two general categories of echolalia have been identified in the language of autistic individuals namely, Immediate echolalia is the repetition of words/sentences that are produced either immediately or a brief time after the production of model utterance. Delayed echolalia is the repetition of stored, usually echoic utterance in new and usually inappropriate contexts.

Immediate echolalia has received the greater amount of attention from the researchers point of view, probably because its easily identified. Some researchers have considered it to be a meaningless parroting that secures no apparent purpose (Lovaas 1977; Schreibman and Carr 1978). Immediate echolalia is discussed as a primitive attempt to maintain social contact when an individual is confronted with language beyond his/her linguistic competence (Fay.1973; Shapiro, 1977). Prizant and Duchan (1981) conducted a systematic study which attempted to discover specific functions of immediate echolalia by analyzing the utterances of four highly echolalic autistic children.

SEVEN FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES OF IMMEDIATE ECHOLALIA

Seven functional categories of immediate echolalia were derived based on videotape analysis of 1,009 utterances produced by the children in interactions with familiar adult in schools and at home during an eight month period. The children in this study produced echoic utterances which were interactive as well as non interactive and which were produced with and without evidence of comprehension. The specific functional categories derived included non-focused, turn taking, declarative, yes-answer, request, rehearsal and self-regulatory.

NATURE OF DELAYED ECHOLALIA

There is an increasing evidence that delayed echolalia is quite a different phenomenon from its immediate counterpart. Kanner (1973) hypothesized that delayed echolalia represented an intermediate stage in movement from immediate echolalia to more flexible and creative language. Wolff and Chess (1965) proposed two categories of delayed echolalia, non-communicative repetition that serves no apparent purpose and communicative repetition, which is used for communication even though it consists of the exact phrases a child has heard others use.

Another pattern of echolalia may be present, i.e., Mitigated echolalia. The term was introduced by Pick (1924) to describe the sight modification he noted in the echolalia of some of his aphasic patients. Fay (1980) found that most of the autistic children repeated the heard speech with some alterations/modifications. This is seen in the higher functioning autistics and is much more advanced then immediate/delayed echolalia. This condition is seen when the child is getting his speech more and more under voluntary control. Stengel (1947) noted two characteristic modifications: 1) Introducing the first person singular into the repeated utterance, and 2) Appending an intelligent response to an echoed question or order.

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND DELAYED ECHOLALIA

Baltaxe and Simmon (1977, 1981) attempted to understand the significance of delayed echolalia for the perspective of language acquisition. They collected audio recordings of the bedtime soliloquies of an 8 year old autistic girl. The child produced all utterances in the absence of other people in the environment; therefore they could not be considered as communicative.

The apparent linguistic sophistication of many of the utterances indicated that they were forms of delayed echolalia. The authors believed that the patterns of utterance produced were a type of linguistic practice in which the child substituted, deleted and/or conjoined segments of utterances which resulted in delayed mitigated echolalia, i.e delayed echolalia with structural changes imposed by the child. The authors indicated that such pattern practice might have been a strategy by which their subject segmented memorized form. The authors speculated that this might be a first step towards the acquisition of a rule governed, generation of a linguistic system for echolalic children.

A GOOD PROGNOSTIC INDICATOR

The presence of echolalia in general is felt to be a good prognostic indicator with the view that echolalia can be later therapeutically modified into meaningful conversations (Shyamala 1989).

Howlin (1981) studied the effect of operant language training versus no language training on the language development of children with autism. One striking finding was that the echolalic children in both the experimental group (language training) and the control group (no language training) had acquired "good phrase speech" at follow up. This finding suggests that the presence of echolalic speech (as opposed to lack of speech) is a positive prognostic indicator for further language development. Further research needs to be carried out with respect to positive or negative effect of echolalia in the language development of autistic children.

ECHOLALIA AND THE LANGUAGE OF THE AUTISTIC CHILDREN

Echolalia has been reported to be a significant variable in the language of the autistic children (Shyamala and Indu 1991). The literature has quoted many studies showing various echolalic patterns in the speech of autistic children.

STUDY OF ECHOLALIA IN INDIAN LANGUAGES-SPEAKING AUTISTIC CHILDREN

Echolalia has been widely studied in the English speaking autistic population. No study on echolalia has been conducted so far in the Indian context focusing on echolalia of the disordered population (autistic children). Hence, a study in one of the Indian languages, namely, Malayalam (belonging to the Dravidian family of languages and largely spoken in the state of Kerala) was taken up considering that such a study would augment the present understanding of the verbal behavior of autistic children and the very nature of the disorder itself. Hence this descriptive study of echolalia was undertaken.

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