Echolalic and spontaneous phrase speech in autistic children.

The study investigated the syntactical level of spontaneous and echolalic utterances of 26 autistic children at different stages of phrase-speech development. In children using very brief utterances, echolalic phrases were significantly longer than their spontaneous speech. At higher levels of language development there were no significant differences between the lengths of echoed and spontaneous utterances. The frequency of echolalic phrases in children's speech was also found to be significantly less than the frequency of their spontaneous remarks, and the frequency of echolalic utterances declined as children advanced in linguistic competence.