Increasing Response Diversity to Intraverbals in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
FFC prompts grow varied answers to the exact questions you teach; add fluency or webbing to make those answers spread.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Two preschool boys with autism practiced answering "name something that..." questions.
The teacher gave FFC prompts: function-feature-class cues like "you eat it, it's crunchy, it's a vegetable.
A multiple-baseline design tracked how many different correct answers each boy gave.
What they found
FFC prompts quickly raised the number of unique right answers on trained questions.
Gains stayed mostly inside the exact questions taught; new questions still got one answer or none.
How this fits with other research
Thakore et al. (2022) ran a near-copy study but added 1-minute fluency timings. Their kids also gave more answers and then used them on brand-new questions, so the 2022 paper updates the 2019 result.
Alzrayer (2020) used intraverbal webbing instead of FFC prompts and got emergent answers across untrained categories, showing a different way to widen responding.
Walpole et al. (2007) warned that most intraverbal studies skip checks for divergent control; the 2019 paper fills part of that gap but still leaves the generalization problem the 2022 paper later solved.
Why it matters
You can copy the FFC prompt script tomorrow to boost answer variety, but do not stop there. Add brief fluency timings or webbing lessons so the new answers travel to untrained questions.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Run three FFC-prompted trials, then do a 30-second fluency timing on the same answers.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of intraverbal prompts on response diversity and novelty in intraverbals posed to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The intraverbal prompts involving function, feature, and class (FFC) of an item were used in the training of three questions requiring multiple responses. Two Chinese boys with ASD (aged 5-6 years) served as participants. A multiple-probe across three behaviors design was employed. The results indicated that the intraverbal prompts effectively increased the number of divergent responses to all three questions. Novel responses emerged at a low level while generalization to similar questions was not observed following the training.
, 2019 · doi:10.1007/s10803-019-04250-3