ECHOLALIA AND SCRIPTING: STRADDLING THE BORDER OF FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE
Have you ever wondered why autistics do scripting and echolalia? Well, here I am today to share with you all about this to gain a better understanding of why this is. Scripting is the repetition of words, phrases, intonation, or sounds of the speech of others, sometimes taken from movies, but also sometimes taken from other sources such as favourite books or something someone else has said. People with Autism Spectrum Disorders often display scripting in the process of learning to talk. However, Echolalia definition on the other hand is defined as the repetition of words, phrases, intonation, or sounds of the speech of others. Children and adults with autism often display echolalia in the process of learning to talk. Immediate echolalia is the exact repetition of someone else’s speech, immediately or soon after the child hears it. Delayed echolalia may occur several minutes, hours, days, or even weeks or years after the original speech was heard. Echolalia is sometimes referred to as “movie talk” because the child can remember and repeat chunks of speech like repeating a movie script. Echolalia was once thought to be non-functional but is now understood to often serve a communicative or regulatory purpose for the child. Let’s imagine that you’re in an environmental setting with a few friends and yourself as autistic. You all are sitting down for dinner at a restaurant or even a group therapy session and yourself as the autistic feel tired and wiped out after having a busy day doing normal activities with your peers. Example 1: During the course of dinner shall we say, that the waitress that has been serving customers make many visits to your table especially asking questions that they usually do. Questions like: How are you tonight? Would you like me to bring any ketchup or hot sauce? Is there anything else I can get you? Would you like more water? Do you want to see the dessert menu? To every one of those questions (and perhaps others I don’t remember), I replied, “I’m good.” “I’m good” made sense the first time and is an okay answer for the others, assuming I didn’t actually want more water or a dessert or need anything else. Except that I did want more water. I was just too tired to override the default script my brain had settled on and by the time I realized what had happened, she had disappeared into the kitchen. Not a big deal. Someone else came around and filled our water glasses a short time later. If they hadn’t, I could have just told the waitress I’d changed my mind and would like some water. Functional or Nonfunctional? So does that make my scripting functional or nonfunctional? This is the question we need to ask ourselves while we are using these formalities of our different languages. “Functional language” generally refers to language pragmatics or the social function of language. It isn’t so much the opposite of nonfunctional as a way of describing a specific class of language. More simply, language is functional if it helps complete interactions like: Inviting Greeting Requesting Demanding Clarifying Refusing Agreeing Offering Suggesting Informing Giving advice Apologizing Complaining In the context of autism, functional and nonfunctional are also used in the more colloquial sense too. Something is functional if it accomplishes the desired goal and nonfunctional if it does not. You’ll often read that echolalia is nonfunctional or stimming is nonfunctional or routines are nonfunctional I’ve talked about the fallacy of these beliefs in the past. Just because something appears to be nonfunctional to an observer does not mean that it is nonfunctional to the person doing it. Sometimes, however, echolalia or scripted language can be nonfunctional and I think it’s important for us to learn to spot those times, either in ourselves or in a loved one. On the surface, my scripted (and probably echolalic) answers to the waitress were functional. She asked. I answered. She went away thinking that we’d completed a series of successful exchanges of information. For me, however, it was a mixed bag. When the script lined up with my actual feelings, it was functional. It was also functional in the sense that it allowed me to reflexively “pass” in a situation that wasn’t high stakes. Not every social interaction is important. Sometimes the goal is simply to answer the other person so they’ll go about their business and leave you alone. The alternative that night was repeated variations on this short yet uncomfortable exchange: Me: I’d like an iced tea, please. Waitress: Would you like sugar? Me: No, I’d like it . . . Me: [can taste what I mean but the word is nowhere to be found] Me: [wow, cannot even produce a word that is close or any word at all] Waitress: . . . Me: [clearly, this flails hand gesture is not conveying what I mean, is my mouth stuck in this open position now? will this silence go on forever?] Waitress: Unsweetened? Me: Yes! Scripting can grease the social wheels and I think those of us who have trained ourselves to pass will often unconsciously default to scripting or echolalia simply to conceal the fact that we can’t find the right word or we’ve lost the thread of a conversation. After all, there’s often subtle, unspoken social pressure to keep a conversation moving along. Scripting becomes nonfunctional when an incorrect or inappropriate script is offered up automatically by a brain pressured to respond. When your peers you are with have observed that you were scripting with the waitress, but not with them. The waitress has other customers and her time at our table is limited. Whether it’s true or not, I feel like I need to come up with a snappy answer so she can move on and do her job. When I’m talking to friends that they know and are used to my pauses and edits of my form of communication. The interesting thing to the autistic