Elimination of echolalic responding to questions through the training of a generalized verbal response.
Teach one phrase and watch echolalia disappear across every new question.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Two echolalic children kept repeating every question back.
The team taught one phrase: "I don't know."
They used a multiple-baseline design and tracked if the echoing stopped.
What they found
After a short teaching block the echoing vanished.
The kids used "I don't know" on brand-new questions they had never seen.
One month later the skill was still there.
How this fits with other research
Kaye et al. (2025) extend this idea. They run a quick functional analysis first to see why the child echoes, then pick the fix.
Lattimore et al. (2009) show the same rapid prompting style can teach a full job skill to non-vocal adults in one day.
Crysdale et al. (2026) seem to do the opposite: they purposely echo the child to spark more speech. The two studies do not clash. Wheatley et al. (1978) stops useless echoing, while Crysdale uses planned echoing to build new vocal play.
Why it matters
You can wipe out question echolalia with a single, short lesson. No need for twenty different answers. Just teach "I don't know" and watch it spread to every unknown question. Try it during natural play or table work and save hours of drilling.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Echolalia, the parroting of the speech of others, is a severe communication disorder frequently associated with childhood schizophrenia and mental retardation. Two echolalic children, one schizophrenic and one retarded, were treated in a multiple-baseline design across subjects. Each child was taught to make an appropriate, non-echolalic verbal response (i.e., "I don't know") to a small set of previously echoed questions. After such training, this response generalized across a broad set of untrained questions that had formerly been echoed. The results obtained were the same irrespective of the specific experimenter who presented the questions. Further, each child discriminated appropriately between those questions that had previously been echoed and those that had not. Followup probes showed that treatment gains were maintained one month later. The procedure is economical, in that it produces a rapid and widespread cessation of echolalic responding.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1978 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1978.11-453