A comparison of textual and echoic prompts on the acquisition of intraverbal behavior in a six-year-old boy with autism.

One six-year-old boy with autism needed to learn full-sentence answers to questions like “Where do you sleep?”.

The team tried two prompt types. Textual: the adult showed a written word “bed”. Echoic: the adult said “bed” and the child repeated it. Both prompts were faded out.

They used a multiple-baseline design across three question sets to see which prompt worked faster.

Textual prompts won. The boy reached full, unprompted sentences sooner with written cues than with spoken ones.

Echoic prompts worked, but learning took longer and needed more trials.

Grosberg et al. (2017) extends the idea. They sent the same textual cues as text messages during home play and also saw quick gains in conversation, showing the trick still works when the prompt comes from a phone.

Gallant et al. (2017) looks like a contradiction: they found no clear winner when they moved an auditory script around. The difference is they kept the auditory prompt; the current study dropped the prompt entirely. Auditory help may work, but you still need to fade it.

Markham et al. (2020) asked a similar prompt-choice question but with physical, model, and gesture cues for receptive labels. There, physical prompts won. Together the papers say: match the prompt type to the skill—text for intraverbals, physical for motor or receptive tasks.

If a child can read, even at a basic level, try textual prompts first for answering questions. They fade cleanly and can transfer to text messages or written cue cards in the classroom. Keep echoics in your toolbox, but expect them to take more repetitions. One quick switch can save you and your learner valuable teaching time.