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USING TIME DELAY TO PROMOTE SPONTANEOUS SPEECH IN AN AUTISTIC CHILD
Author(s) -
Ingenmey Rita,
Houten Ron
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
journal of applied behavior analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.1
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1938-3703
pISSN - 0021-8855
DOI - 10.1901/jaba.1991.24-591
Subject(s) - psychology , imitation , multiple baseline design , autism , generalization , intervention (counseling) , audiology , developmental psychology , spontaneous recovery , language delay , nonverbal communication , speech delay , cognitive psychology , language development , neuroscience , medicine , mathematical analysis , mathematics , psychiatry , pediatrics
One of the frequently observed deficits in autistic children is their lack of spontaneous speech. We used a multiple baseline across behaviors to investigate the effectiveness of a time delay procedure for inducing spontaneous speech in a 10‐year‐old male autistic child during play. We first taught the child to imitate the experimenter's verbal prompts that described the child's motor response. Once the child reached criteria on imitation, we implemented baseline wherein an immediate verbal prompt for speech was provided after each of the child's motor responses. Intervention consisted of a gradual delay in the presentation of the verbal prompts. The time delay effectively increased the child's spontaneous speech on trained items; some generalization to untrained items also occurred, but only within the same behavioral class of car play. Generalization was also observed across settings. Spontaneous speech remained at high levels during the 4‐month maintenance for the behavior of car play but decreased for a second behavior. Decreases in the child's response latencies suggest that spontaneous speech may be an anticipatory verbal response.