L’écholalie chez l’enfant autiste : un trouble pragmatique de l’unité interactionnelle ?

Abstract

Echolalia is the excessive repetition, immediate or delayed, of the words of others. This is one of the main symptoms of verbal communication in autism. A non-exhaustive review of the literature, and some clinical observations, suggest that echolalia can be explained by a pragmatic impairment of speech interactions, rather than specific language impairment. In a specific way, echolalia is regarded as a lack of unity or interactional integration. We give here some arguments which support these two hypotheses.