Also called echophrasia, it is involuntary repetitive parroting of the words or speech fragments of others, sometimes including an exact replication of the speaker”s pattern of inflection. it can be immediate or delayed (e.g., repetition of television commercials), occurring minutes hours, days, weeks, months and even years after hearing the speech of others. While echolalia features in normal language development and then decreases with greater linguistic abilities, it occurs with greater persistence in autism (up to 75% of individuals in some form), (catatonic) schizophrenia, aphasics, and Tourette’s syndrome.
See Aphasia, Autism, Tourette’s syndrome