Thinking on Treating Echolalia in Aphasia: Recommendations and Caveats for Future Research Directions

Imitation in the form of repeating speech sounds, accents, and words plays a foundational role in the normal acquisition and development of language (Meltzoff et al., 2009; Adank et al., 2013) eventually contributing to a life-long fine-tuning of communication skills (Tannen, 1987; Delvaux and Soquet, 2007). Imitation of prosodic and paralinguistic features may be intentional in certain contexts (e.g., mockery, impersonation, acting rehearsal). However, in general, imitation in healthy subjects is unintended as it involves automatic mimicry of non-essential components of the acoustic-phonetic information (speaking rate, prosody, accent) embedded in the heard message (Kappes et al., 2010)—the so-called chameleon effect. Therefore, it seems that verbal imitation is not the same as verbal repetition because in the latter, the auditory stimulus is intentionally repeated and the reproduced speech contains relevant phonological information, but the incidental acoustic features of the perceived stimulus are not invariably mimicked (Kappes et al., 2009, 2010).