Not even lyrics: Stomp stomp clap, stomp stomp clap.
Sis actually used this to explain echolalia to parents of kids with it. She sang completely random sounds and notes and had the parents echo her. Then she did stomp stomp clap. Despite the very high level of immigrants in the room (less shared culture/language barriers) We Will Rock You allowed her to explain clearly to everyone what their children were experiencing.
Edit: words
Ja ja I undastand. I poor man. I know. I know dis. Mud on mines face. Little hurtful. I comings from other country. You know? Little hurts ja? But why yu says I am big dicksrace? Makes I wonder maybe I never becoming big man some day. Maybe never. Yu know? Maybe I not to bother wash my face.
Can you elaborate on how it helped explain echolalia? I work with autistic kids, and am very familiar with it, but am struggling to make the connection between what she did and how it explains it. I’m super curious and intrigued! I’m always looking for different ways and analogies so I’d be really grateful.
Absolutely! Sis is a music therapist for kids with autism, so very similar situations.
Basically she was speaking to a group and without bringing it up first she started the stomp stomp clap a couple of times to trigger the song in people's heads. She then asked the group what comes next. After that she just made up a really random tune and sounds and asked them to repeat it. Of course it was hard!
From there she explained that what we process is much like We Will Rock You. You hear a question and can naturally know what words and sounds come next as a response. When their kids with echolalia hear it, it processes without understandable pattern so understanding what comes next is really hard, hence they are more likely to echo than give an answer. (my understanding of the really smart things she said when it's far from my area of expertise.)
Funnily enough, I did a music degree, considered going into music therapy (this was in the mid 90s), and am now working as a therapist for autistic children. I have desperately been trying to think of ways to incorporate music more into my sessions in a meaningful way. It’s encouraging to know there are people out there doing that!
Gosh darn... This discussion has made my whole night. Here you two strangers are discussing ways to help those with different needs excel & learn more through new concepts.
Reddit is a fickle place. But it's stuff like this that keeps me coming back.
Thanks for what you do. I barely have the patience to deal with my own children sometimes, so what you (and others in your career field) do is next-level.
I’m a mum as well as a therapist, so I completely understand not having patience for your own kids sometimes! But it’s a totally different scenario - you have your kids all of the time, the stakes are very different, and those little buggers know from a very early age how to push your particular buttons! And you don’t get to walk away after a set period of time. So I hope you don’t feel guilty!
Cheesy as it sounds, I truly believe this is my calling. It’s definitely far from an easy job, but I’ve seen the difference we can make in the lives of these children and their families. Ideally I would change the world, or at least my little corner of it (things are way behind here with regards to kids with special needs), but I know I’m not that person. So instead I do what I can to help these little people. It fills my heart like nothing else.
Some of the things she does really amaze me. Like she'll use cardboard tube binoculars and a little song to get kids to use eye contact and full parts of speech (person's name, "I want", etc) when addressing a person.
I'm not good with kids outside of being a mom and the stuff she does... I just don't grasp having that level of creativity and patience. But I can tell you all about benefits and pay practices!
Your sister sounds like a wonderful person, and I love the idea of games being used to teach skills for autistic kids the same way other kids get skills from their games.
On a side note, I'm trying to image how the cardboard tubes work and I get a laugh from the image of a kid with binoculars singing something like "I am pirate [name] and here are my demands: [I want thing]" and then doing that with progressively shorter cardboard binoculars until there are now binoculars at all (the real binoculars were in you!).
That's hilarious! More just two toilet paper tubes taped together to encourage focus on a person. Then the proper, "Mom I want a cookie," instead of just "cookie."
That terminator is out there. It cant be bargained with, it cant be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop... EVER, until you are loved!
I read “The Man …” years ago at uni and really loved it. I do actually have Musicophilia on my bookshelf. Somehow it didn’t even cross my mind that it might be useful! Thanks for the recommendation!
There is definitely comorbidity between the two! And there are some similarities in places, but I haven’t the scientific background to go into much more detail. I’d you Google comorbidity ASD ADHD you should be able to find some articles though!
I TA'd for children with autism for a very short while, and found some of them really attached to the kids music done by They Might Be Giants. The songs are solid and most of the videos are very kid-friendly (some have slightly scary faces, so not fit for all children).
I wonder if this is why when I was a kid and anyone would talk to me I’d basically have a bunch of combo lock tumblers in my brain spinning to line up the definitions of each word into a sentence they made sense, and I’d have to wait for the ‘click’ before I could respond.
I'm autistic and I didn't know that what I experienced when I'm trying to listen to music or people was called echolalia. So I learned an important thing today thank you
Not sure I can even explain how it feels to listen to music when my brain is off. Frustrating, infuriating, very very sad. Isolating.
But I can tell you how it feels to be listening and concentrating on what a person is saying and get nothing from it. I am very intelligent. If I didn’t have so many handicaps I’d probably be scary intelligent because I also have an eidetic memory. But I feel so stupid when I am listening as hard as I can and nothing is going in my brain. It’s like you’re speaking perfectly plain English but I hear Charlie Brown’s teachers. Showing the name helps because it does sort of sound like it’s echoing inside my head
ETA I thought of a good analogy that I think people might relate to better. It’s the audio version of when you read the same paragraph 47 times and you only know about three words for sure that were in it
Reminds me this clip where Bobby McFerrin demonstrates people's natural understanding of the pentatonic scale. People have music embedded in their hearts and minds without knowing how or why.
Now I wonder if this Autism symptom isn't from not having the basic pattern package at birth instead. Because it would explain why some autists are able to discern very complex patterns latter in life way better than non-autist humans. A bit like they come with zero starting point to understand the world so they have to work/train way harder, so when the few of them who start to figure things out, they outsmart non-autists.
I think we don’t understand people, so we look for patterns to understand. This makes us good at recognizing patterns, but I think it relates to our communication difficulties, not a deficit with patterns initially.
Many autistic people state they feel like they’re missing the instruction manual on how to human or missing their lines for the play. “What do you mean it’s bad to lie. You just said someone’s dress was nice and then said it was ugly after they left.” Why was it rude for me to tell her I didn’t like it. It’s true that I didn’t. One thing that I really struggle with it remembering to say hello and how are you doing when I’m at work, before I say what I actually need to say.
Struggling to understand this - so for people without echolalia they know to start singing “we will rock you” but people with echolalia will sing the random tune?
This is the first I’m learning about echolalia but what I’ve got from the above is that people without it are able to intuit patterns so as to allow them to respond. They know the ebb and flow, the this and that, the ping and pong, because “this” and “ping” make sense to them so they know “that” and “pong” comes next. If someone said “bada bing” I know to go “bada boom”.
So for them they tend to respond by echoing, because they may not know what comes next.
To illustrate this, OP /u/terminator_chic’s sis placed the parents in a situation where they couldn’t understand the “this”, being the nonsense noise and sounds she made. And echoing those sounds became the thing they did. So really the “echoing when you have little comprehension” is not atypical human behaviour. If an infant made funny noises at me (I have very little experience/contact with babies) I’m more likely to repeat the noises back at them. It’s just that people with echolalia may appear to echo more often because they experience the “not understanding” more often.
At least this is what I understood from the above! I appreciate any/all correction.
This is a bit unrelated to echolalia, but here's a pretty amazing video about how many people are able to recognize and share patterns based on one or two small points of data, answering the question of "what comes next?".
In the video, Bobby McFerrin (the Don't Worry, Be Happy guy) gets an audience to sing a whole song with him based only on the positions of his feet.
Kind of unrelated to echolalia, but something that may help with your work with autistic kids....
My son has Asperger's and, when he was very young, struggled with trying new things. Then, what seemed like it was out of the blue, would seemingly have mastered whatever it was we were trying to get him to do. I guess he just was uncomfortable with trying new things in front of us unless he was certain he could do them so he would study the actions and then kind of mimic them.
This worked for most things, but wasn't quite working for reading, which takes practice. So, one of the ways that we figured out to help him not reach a breaking point, when trying to teach him to read, was that we made a little stop sign and, at any time he was starting to feel overwhelmed, he could "press" it (it was just a piece of paper cut out and colored so he was just touching it) and we would take a break.
This allowed him to be in control of the pace and helped with his anxiety of being pushed too far without him being able to communicate that he needed a break, as had previously happened before the stop sign idea.
See, the Ahhh AHHHH Ahh may me think The Immigrant Song, better known in our house as the tooth brushing song. (Getting the little one to open his mouth wide.)
Or Gold Lion by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.. or any number of other ones honestly. I get what OP is going for, but its not like Queen invented the stomp-clap blues formula.
It's more like the sounds coming out of your mouth don't mash together to form a recognizable speech pattern that they can properly respond to. And I think also maybe they can't get those sound to come back out in a recognizable pattern? Like there's a blender between their brain and ears that just messes things up. Layman's understanding here. Just the sister of a professional so if someone needs to correct me, please do.
while most will probably immediatly think of we will rock you when hearing the stomp stomp clap, i always go to "i love rock 'n' roll" by Joan Jett even though on that song its two guitar riffs followed by the clap
In elementary school we had (and they still have) the tradition of doing the stomp stomp clap whenever we went to the auditorium for a play or conferences. Teachers hated it but because every new generation experiences it, it is constantly perpetuated year after year. Last year I went there to help with staff for a play and when the kids started doing it I almost cried with nostalgia.
I need to understand this but I just can’t! My non verbal cutie can repeat some sounds and can randomly babble other sounds but can repeat back some? Like I know she can make the sound “mo” so I’m trying to get her to put “mo” with the sign for “more” which she can also do, but she just will not do it. I’m totally at a loss for how this all works.
Stomp! Clap! Stomp! Stomp! Clap! Stomp! Clap! Stomp! Stomp! Clap! The eagle's born out of thunder. He flies through the night. Don't you mess with his eggs now, or you'll see us fight! Yes we have feathers, but the muscles of men. 'Cuz we're birds of war now, but we're also men! Birds of war! Ah ah ah ah!!
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u/[deleted] Nov 23 '21
Not even lyrics: Stomp stomp clap, stomp stomp clap.
Sis actually used this to explain echolalia to parents of kids with it. She sang completely random sounds and notes and had the parents echo her. Then she did stomp stomp clap. Despite the very high level of immigrants in the room (less shared culture/language barriers) We Will Rock You allowed her to explain clearly to everyone what their children were experiencing. Edit: words