Teaching receptive naming of Chinese characters to children with autism by incorporating echolalia.

The facilitative effect of incorporating echolalia on teaching receptive naming of Chinese characters to children with autism was assessed. In Experiment 1, echoing the requested character name prior to the receptive naming task facilitated matching a character to its name. In addition, task performance was consistently maintained only when echolalia preceded the receptive manual response. Positive results from generalization tests suggested that learned responses occurred across various novel conditions. In Experiment 2, we examined the relation between task difficulty and speed of acquisition. All 3 participants achieved 100% correct responding in training, but learning less discriminable characters took more trials than learning more discriminable characters. These results provide support for incorporating echolalia as an educational tool within language instruction for some children with autism.

Cues-pause-point language training: teaching echolalics functional use of their verbal labeling repertoires.

We evaluated the direct and generalized effects of cues-pause-point language training procedures on immediate echolalia and correct responding in two severely retarded females. Two experiments were conducted with each subject in which the overall goal was to encourage them to remain quiet before, during, and briefly after the presentation of questions and then to verbalize on the basis of environmental cues whose labels represented the correct responses. Multiple baseline designs across question/response pairs (Experiment I) or question/response pairs and settings (Experiment II) demonstrated that echolalia was rapidly replaced by correct responding on the trained stimuli. More importantly, there were clear improvements in subjects' responding to untrained stimuli. Results demonstrated that the cues-pause-point procedures can be effective in teaching severely retarded or echolalic individuals functional use of their verbal labeling repertoires.

Modifying echolalic speech in preschool children: training and generalization.

An operant-conditioning technique was used to teach three handicapped children exhibiting echolalia to respond appropriately to a series of questions. The technique included punishment of echolalic responses and reinforcement of appropriate responses that were cued by a tape recording of the appropriate response. Frequencies of correct responses to the questions increased for each child following a within-subject multiple baseline design. Echolalic responding eliminated in response to trained questions. Generalization of training to several functional responses was found in addition to increased spontaneous use of a functional phrase. Generalization of trained responses across settings and stimuli was also suggested. A 12-month follow-up of two of the subjects revealed no increase in echolalic responding and moderate maintenance of the trained responses. The subjects also showed notable response generalization to untrained questions at the time of the follow-up probe.