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Contextualism and Echolalia

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Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10257))

Abstract

This paper argues for the need to distinguish more clearly between the presence of a communicative intention (that a speaker is attempting to communicate something) and the content of the speaker’s utterance (what that is that they are trying to communicate), and consider the role of contextual information in the recognition of the former, independently of the latter. The paper uses experimental and clinical evidence from studies on echolalia (a common symptom of autism spectrum disorder, in which a child repeats verbatim other people’s utterances) to demonstrate the possibility of a speaker who utters conventional, supposedly meaningful sentences, in a seemingly automatic and noncommunicative manner. As a result, the listener is forced to rely on the wide context to determine the presence or absence of a communicative intention behind the speaker’s utterance, as a condition for interpreting the content of the utterance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Schuler notes further that turn-taking echolalia is reminiscent of normal and common conversational behavior that reflects reciprocity and is instrumental in regulating joint action, thereby challenging the assumption that pathological echolalia can be strictly separated from other forms of imitative behavior that are not pathological (see next section for further discussion).

  2. 2.

    In fact, the heterogeneous nature of echolalic behavior drove some researchers to argue that pathological echolalia cannot be strictly separated from echolalic behavior in normal language development as well as other forms of normal imitative behavior. For example, Schuler (1979) submits that since “echolalia is not easy to define or distinguish from more normal forms of repetition,” they “should not be viewed as separate, but rather as related entities; their difference being a matter of degree” (pp. 425, 427).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Polonsky Academy, The van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 43 Jabotinsky Street, Jerusalem, 9214116, Israel

    Michal Gleitman

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  1. Michal Gleitman
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Correspondence to Michal Gleitman .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Pierre and Marie Curie University , Paris, France

    Patrick Brézillon

  2. University of Maine , Orono, Maine, USA

    Roy Turner

  3. University of Genoa , Genoa, Italy

    Carlo Penco

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Gleitman, M. (2017). Contextualism and Echolalia. In: Brézillon, P., Turner, R., Penco, C. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10257. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-57836-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-57837-8

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