Melanie Weber

speaker

894 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2023 last heard 23 Oct

Melanie Weber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.

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The NeuroAffirm Podcast · Ep. 104 Why We Shouldn't Eliminate Echolalia Hosted by Melanie Weber · 23 Oct 2025 podcast

Hello and welcome to the NeuroAffirm show.

I'm obviously not Jesse Ginsberg.

My name is Melanie and I'm so excited to be taking over the show for today.

So you may have seen me on other episodes of the live show or in our online trainings hosted by both Jesse and Chris.

I've also done several online trainings in the NeuroAffirm Therapy Academy and I've spoken at state and local conventions all about how embracing neurodiversity

And how that really changes everything when we support our autistic kids that way.

I have been a speech pathologist for 10 years and the last four of those years I've had the honor of working alongside Jesse really helping SLPs understand how sensory and communication are deeply connected.

And today I am so excited to be taking over the show to talk about a client that absolutely changed everything for me.

And his story set me off on a completely different path of how I view communication.

And it's the reason I like firmly believe that we should never try to eliminate echolalia.

And so we're going to be diving into that today.

And before I go any further, I think it's incredibly important that we define what echolalia means because you could just do a quick Google search and it's going to tell you one thing.

And I would love to share some insights about what I view echolalia as.

So when I say echolalia or scripting, we're talking about the repetitive use of specific phrases.

They're often drawn from media or conversations or previous experiences.

And in the past, echolalia was definitely viewed as meaningless.

And even today, I feel like there's this narrative that we should just ignore it or and it'll go away or, oh, they're just using movie talk.

And I think it's important that we remember that echolalia is a repetitive use of phrases, but that can come from movies or conversations.

And so I've talked to a lot of autistic adults and, you know, people have said, well, what did people do before there was TV?

You know, was Echolalia around?

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