Echolalia as communicative strategy: Fictive interaction in the speech of children with autism

We explore how fictive interaction (Pascual 2002, 2014), manifested as echolalia (i.e. prior speech repeated verbatim), is successfully used by autistic children as a compensatory strategy in conversation. We video-recorded four Brazilian autistic children between the ages of 4 and 12 in interactions with adults in weekly therapy sessions. We found that these autistic children do not use direct speech to represent prior speech only, as in ordinary reported speech. Instead, they use direct speech to make mental contact with past (types of) communicative situations. Reenactment is used fictively as a means of expressing needs, describing situations, and referring to people, animals, and events. These fictive quotations may reflect socio-communicative or sociocultural knowledge, or experiences with prior specific interactions.