Exposure to a specific prompt topography predicts its relative efficiency when teaching intraverbal behavior to children with autism spectrum disorder

Roncati and her team worked with three preschoolers with autism. They wanted to see if giving extra practice with one kind of prompt would make that prompt work faster later.

Each child first got more trials with either a picture prompt or a spoken prompt. Then the team switched to teaching new intraverbal questions. They counted how many trials each child needed to master the new questions.

The prompt style each child saw first kept winning. If a child saw extra picture prompts first, picture prompts later taught new answers in fewer trials. The same thing happened for spoken prompts.

All three kids showed the same pattern. A little extra exposure tipped the scales and made that prompt type the quicker teacher.

Levin et al. (2014) used a blocked-trials prompting plan for intraverbals and also saw fast learning. Roncati adds the idea that even a short early bias can lock in that efficiency.

Schnell et al. (2020) took the next step. They built a five-minute test that finds each child's best prompt type. Their work extends Roncati by turning the "extra exposure" trick into a quick assessment you can run before teaching starts.

Klaus et al. (2019) compared two prompt styles for sight words and saw no clear winner for most kids. That looks like a clash, but the tasks differ: Roncati taught back-and-forth conversation answers, Klaus taught reading. Prompt history may matter more for intraverbals than for simple labeling.

You can tilt the table toward faster learning by giving a few extra trials with the prompt you plan to keep. If you like picture prompts, run a handful more at the start. The child will likely master new intraverbal questions faster later. When you need to pick a prompt on the fly, remember that the first few trials set the pace for the rest of the session.