The thing that becomes interesting is why, and how, this probably very normal way of functioning, becomes outward echolalia? Or stiffled, pronounced inward echolalia for that matter.

Which is where I would like to bring in the concept of narrative. Sometimes the language modules are just free-floating for me. But very often I string them together in a narrative, and most often what I have is something like a story-book with a narrative PLUS these free-floating words, phrases and images running parallel, sort of like subtitles.

I grew up in a household where it was the norm that you “talked to the dog”, ie narrated what you were doing to no-one in particular. I’ve since wondered how much that influenced my development – I can’t remember that I was ever encouraged to “talk to myself”, but I certainly wasn’t discouraged! I used to tell “stories”, try out phrases and words and narrative-connections between language snippets on the dog and my toys, both audible and silently.
Then I went to a school that for the first years really focused on the telling and re-telling of stories.

I wonder if AC children in less narrative-intense/focused environments are slower/more obviously different in their language use?

Eh, got sidetracked here a bit, there’s another thing I wanted to mention about “free floating bits of vocabulary”:
Foreign languages. And grammar of foreign languages.
My family is alternately impressed and bored sick by my deciphering of languages I don’t know (but related to languages I do know). It’s just something I do, I can’t help it. With the aid of even a very limited phrase-book or word-book I’ve so far picked up enough Polish, Slovak/Czech, Romanian, Estonian and French&Italian to be able to read signs and menus without much trouble. (My “real” languages, in order, are Swedish, English and Finnish. German I have actually studied, but am not fluent at all in.) With a little more exposure Latvian and Lithuanian isn’t impossible, but Hungarian seems hopeless. Anything written in cyrillic (or Greek) is very hard, though I do know the alphabet.

The thing with this is that I just can’t stop searching for the meaning of foreign words when I see them – it’s somewhat like a crossword puzzle. I know that word in that language, this word in another and that grammatical construct in a third – now what does that sign in a fourth language mean?
I can’t see a bi- or tri-lingual sign without picking apart the difference in words used and grammatical structure between the languages.

None of this means that I find it easy to actually *learn* languages, in a communicative sense. It’s just that I seem to have an instinct for picking apart words and their grammatical place. And it leads to these slightly absurd situations when my SO and I are driving in say Poland and I’ll tell him “we should turn right after that billboard advertising furniture wholesale / at that sign that says ‘State forestry school’ “, [the latter might well say “school-about-wood belonging to state” if translated exactly – I told you grammar is fascinating!] and he goes “Whaa?! Where?! Which?”.

Every neon sign in Times Square had a new color added to its spectrum. It seemed to reside somewhere between silver and orange, bled off into the ultraviolet and the infrared at one and the same time, had tinges of vermillion at the top and jade at the bottom and resembled no other color ever seen by human eyes…It smelled like a forest of silver pines after the rain, with scents of camomile, juniper, melissa, and mountain gentain thrown in. It felt like the flesh of a three-week-old baby’s instep. It tasted like lithograph ink, but there are people who like the taste of lithograph ink.

Someone said it was the exact color of caring.

That kind of thing influenced a lot of my writing (and thinking, when I was in the process of trying to come up with ways to describe things in words, which took — and still takes — a considerable amount of mental bandwidth) as an adolescent. I was particularly attracted to long, flowery descriptions of things that were difficult to describe, or that seemed to have contradictory attributes that made words tremendously hard to apply to them. I’d read something like the Ellison passage quoted above and then find myself recycling little bits and pieces of similar phrasing and vocabulary.

“Instead of manipulating our language while claiming to be making our thoughts clearer, people need to teach us in some way (and there are many ways to do it, many of which are not things most people would think of in terms of teaching language) how to take our ability to repeat phrases (or sentences, paragraphs, songs, whatever) and make the words we repeat as connected as possible to the things we’re actually thinking.”

Could you give me an example? If you’ve already discussed this, I apologize.

That can happen (as you describe) during the usual hypnagogic hallucination period before sleep, but can also happen when more awake than that.

My daughter will chatter away, and if you stop to listen carefully, you realize she’s quoting this or that or the other video or book she’s familiar with. I point out a train, and she starts quoting Green Eggs and Ham. Or she echoes back what you just said to her.

They’re both getting speech therapy in school; when they were admitted, we were asked if it would be OK for them to share speech therapy sessions. We had no objection to them sharing a speech therapist for the session with another child, but a therapy session geared toward one would be near useless for the other.

Anyway, so that’s an interesting thing about my twins. The interesting thing I’ve noticed this week is that she is pushing him when he’s standing on the carpet and he’s falling over, and then he’s pushing her off the coffee table and she’s landing on her feet perfectly, like a little orange cat. Gravity is a liability for him, and gravity is a lovely tool for her.

Oh, and is anyone else very fond of the ST:TNG episode “Darmok”?

In that last sentence, I lost the word that comes after ‘practical’. I had to string my way through “use?” “terms?” “purposes!” to get to it. If my brain was wired in such a way that I had to say the words out loud to get there, I’d no doubt get a very different reaction from people.

But what it feels like is: I can feel the shape of the word that comes next, and I know there *is* a correct word, but I’ve misplaced the label, the bit that’s what the word actually *is*, how it sounds, how it’s written.

And I’ll cast around for the right word for a while, and if I can’t find it then my brain does a background search on it, I think. An hour, a day, a week later, there’ll be a ‘ding!’ (not a literal ding, no) and my brain will cough up the right word into my conscious mind. By that time I may or may not remember why I needed the word – sometimes all I’ll remember is that I forgot that word at some point, and here it is.

[To Evonne at comment 14: I feel the same way about formal verse. (I used to think that the sign of a successful sonnet is one where you don’t realise it’s a sonnet until you stop to count.) It’s not about putting square pegs in a round hole, it’s finding the round pegs you want. Only sometimes the appropriate round peg doesn’t exist, and sometimes a round hole isn’t what you needed in the first place.]

About echolalia: sometimes just before I’m going to sleep, I hear ‘voices’. They’re how I imagine echolalia is like. A long stream of unordered sentences and phrases, in various different speaking voices. It happens most often if I’ve had a lot of social contact that day – frequently I’ll recognise the speaking voice I’m hearing as someone I actually did hear that day. Once I’m actually asleep, I’ll get music and narrative structure too, and it’s really frustrating that I can’t do those as well when I’m awake.