Conversations on echolalia: A qualitative inquiry into autistic adults’ views on echolalia, language, and music

Introduction: Considering the growing influence of the Neurodiversity movement on the literature on autism, we attempted to shed a new light on autistic echolalia in music therapy by exploring the topic from an identity-first viewpoint. We interviewed autistic adults and studied this phenomenon from their perspective. Method: Five adults on the autism spectrum were interviewed. For the data collection phase, Reductive Phenomenology was used. The participants were asked to reflect on the need to echo as they understand it and discuss possible reasons that may lead autistic clients to echo during music therapy. They were also asked about musical aspects that echolalia may have. For the analysis of the data, the guidelines of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis were followed to extract themes and categories from the data. Results: The interviewees pointed at two main reasons for echolalia in their opinion: (a) intra-personal reasons that mainly function to self-regulate the echoing person; and the much less frequently mentioned (b) inter-personal reasons that relate to interactions with others. They also pointed at several connections between music and echolalia, for example, the heightened awareness to the prosody of words rather than their content and the use of songs as echolalia. Discussion: The information provided by the interviewees is compared to descriptions of echolalia in the literature. Enabling the participants to share their autistic experience, we believe, is an opportunity to hold back preconceived assumptions about echolalia made by non-autistic music therapists and other professionals, and to help them improve their clinical understanding of echolalia.