Long-term follow-up of echolalia and question answering.

The team tracked kids who had earlier learned to answer questions with less echoing. They called each family 26 to 57 months after the last lesson. A new adult asked some old questions and some brand-new ones over the phone. They counted how much echolalia came back and how many answers were still right.

Most kids kept their gains. Echolalia stayed low and correct answers stayed high. It did not matter if the caller was the old trainer or a stranger. It also did not matter if the question had been trained before or was new. The skills held for two to five years with no extra practice.

LaLonde et al. (2020) and Shillingsburg et al. (2020) show the same thing: verbal-behavior lessons can stick. They used games and errorless teaching to grow question answers and longer mands. Their kids kept the skills weeks later, just like the 1990 kids kept them years later.

Moraleda-Sepulveda et al. (2025) push the idea further. They gave a preschooler 27 hours of language work every week for a month. Big jumps came fast. The 1990 paper says those fast gains can still be there when the child is older, even with lighter early doses.

Martin et al. (1997) used the same long follow-up trick with functional communication training at home. Both studies prove that when you teach a useful verbal skill, it can last 27 months or more without booster sessions.

You can tell parents and funders that good verbal-behavior teaching pays off for years, not weeks. Pick targets the child will need everywhere—like answering who, what, and where. Once the skill is strong, it is likely to stay, even with new people and new questions. That frees you to move on to the next goal instead of giving endless maintenance drills.