daughter has an american accent - we're not from US

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My daughter has an American accent which she seems to have picked up from TV / movies. We're in rural Northern Ireland so there are some similarities but no one else talks like her around here. She says garbage and not rubbish and many other Americanisms too. She repeats things she hears on TV a lot and sometimes it feels like I'm talking to a robot rather than a child. Sounds unkind of me I know. I still love my wee robot!
Anyone experienced something similar with their kid!?

Forgot to she's being assessed for Aspergers, not just because of that, because of number of symtpoms.

Fascinating. When I came to the U.S. I was the only one in my family who never adopted a true American accent. To this day, many, many moons later, people still ask me where did I come from because my accent is evident.

When I was little, I used movie lines as my speech, and blurted them out at inapprorpriate times. For instance, when I was four, I blurted out the phrase, "Get the hell out of hear" at my babysitter, who was a strict disciplinarian. I remember picking that line up from the movie "Home Alone." There were other examples. I still repeat things to myself softly sometimes. But this echolalia has definitely diminished over the decades.

When I was a child, I had a British accent and I grew up in New Jersey. I got picked on a lot, but it was just the way that I talked for some reason. I think this has to do with the female Aspergian's gift of mimicry and we become adept at this mimicry so that we can blend in social situations. But I couldn't say for sure!

I'm from Trinidad & Tobago. People used to tease me and call me Jamaican. That was an irritant and thorn in my side; at the same time, I can see their ignorance over the whole thing. Those who persisted on using Jamaican words at me even though they were told I'm not Jamaican earned my ire.

BTW, I lived with a few Irish folks when I lived in Queens, NY. Adorable people.

my accent is 'general midwestern'. I grew up in largely Ebonics-speaking cultures.....

I remember reading a thread here once which suggested that autistic people are more likely to have a different accent to their surroundings or not pick up the local accent from the people around them in the way you would expect. I have lived all of my life in the place I was born and people ask me where I'm from (I live in the north of England and apparently sound southern). My cousin, who is more severely autistic than I am, often speaks with an American accent he has picked up from TV/films like your daughter. He tends to come out with words and phrases he's memorised from films and adverts.

It may also be because it's easier to memorise words and phrases, especially from things which are watched repeatedly. You will find that your daughter probably has a stockpile of phrases she will use, which is because we autistic people often have difficulty finding the right thing to say in a social situation. If we create an inner reference library we can pick the one which seems appropriate instead of struggling to think it through and work it out using the social rules which to us are difficult to understand. This may seem "robot-like" to someone who is neurotypical, but it's just a way of managing communication when it is a challenge.

Actually I kinda went through a similar phase-but I was somewhat bigger and older than your tot at the time.

Never lived outside the USA.

When I was in college I tended to get my hair styled in bangs and folks would even say that I "looked like a British rockstar". I listened the Who, and watched alot of Monty Python, and PBS British import TV. Apparently it all must have rubbed off and people would ask if I was 'from Britian- you look british, you sound british'. I even had to bite my tongue once when cleaning up the apartment with my roomate who was always giving me grief when I pointed to his pack of Marlboros and almost said "well.. you leave your fags on the coffee table!" ( American readers: 'fag' means 'cigarette' in the UK. British readers: 'fag' means 'a homosexual man' in the USA.)

And what's wrong with speaking a different accent? In the part of Canada where I live we all supposedly have what sound like Irish-American accents, but I really don't, although I occasionally like to imitate it. In 7th Grade my English teacher gave us a test that taught me speaking that way was bad grammar and made us look stupid or uneducated. And my older brother was a REAL grammar Nazi. After he got a high score on his grammar test when we were younger I couldn't even speak informal English around him. But that may have just one of the things he did to drive me crazy because he's my brother. On the other hand he still couldn't properly say "spaghetti." The other night I was reading on Wiki about all the differences between Canadian English, American English, and of course English, and it really hurt my brain. Most of the differences are so subtle I'm like, who CARES if you pronounce it ash-phalt or as-phalt??? We spell "color" with a "u", but we don't spell "tire" with a y and we call car fuel gasoline and not petrol, but if I said zee instead of zed people would probably act like I just betrayed the whole country. One time I said "candy bar" instead of "chocolate bar" and I was like oh no I sound like a 'merican! Actually it said on Wiki that only solid chocolate bars are called that for legal reasons. They label them as candy bars if they have a non-chocolate inside, like say a Mars Bar. I used to think that way as a kid, guess I was smarter back then. I refer to my way of speaking as "North American" English since I use words both from the States and from Canada, although I'd rather bite my tongue off than say "eh" at the end of my sentences.

Sorry for the long rant but that's been bugging me for a really long time now. Maybe I'll go relax by listening to CBC Radio while eating some poutine for supper and then some maple cookies for dessert.