Echolalia and Unconventional Verbal Behavior – A Discussion with Barry Prizant, Dave Finch and Rebecca Rosenzweig

Echolalia has a very special place in Barry’s life. It became a topic of fascination and an enthusiasm in his very early work with a group of wonderful young autistic boys. His deep interest resulted in a federally funded dissertation that challenged and overturned misinformed and disrespectful views of echolalia disseminated by Ivar Lovaas, the father of ABA. Rather than seeing echolalia as meaningless parroting and psychotic speech that needed to be “extinguished”, Barry’s research demonstrated that it could serve multiple communicative functions and reflected a “gestalt style” of learning language, a different strategy of language acquisition closely tied to differences in cognitive development. Barry and Dave discuss this history and how echolalia must be considered when understanding language of autistic people. They are joined by Rebecca Rosenzweig, a young autistic woman who shares her experiences with echolalia.