Producing speech use in nonverbal autistic children by reinforcing attempts.
Reinforce every vocal attempt today—clear speech grows from messy tries.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with three nonverbal autistic children .
They compared two ways to teach first words.
One way gave a toy for any vocal try, even a grunt.
The other way gave a toy only for clear mouth sounds like “ba.”
Sessions flipped back and forth in an ABAB design so each child served as their own control.
What they found
Any-vocal-try condition won every time.
Kids spoke more often and looked happier.
When the rule switched back to “perfect sounds only,” speech dropped again.
The jump showed up in the first session and held across kids.
How this fits with other research
Chen et al. (2001) extends this idea into play.
They trained typical peers to hand over toys for any word during recess.
Autistic kids then used more words, joint attention, and pretend play, proving the trick works in real life, not just at the table.
Pfadt (1991) seems to disagree.
That study found many autistic toddlers prefer squeaks or music over mom’s voice.
The clash clears up when you see the age gap: L et al. worked with 3- to young learners who already played with people, while A tested younger toddlers still learning that voices matter.
Reinforcing any vocal try may only click after kids notice speech has social value.
Why it matters
Stop waiting for perfect articulation.
Reinforce grunts, squeals, or “uh” right away and pair the sound with the item the child wants.
You will see more vocal tries, happier faces, and a faster path to first words.
Track the shift daily; once attempts flow, you can shape clearer speech later.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
It has been extremely difficult to teach speech to severely handicapped nonverbal autistic children. However, an overview of the literature suggests the possibility that selecting aspects of motivation as a central target behavior, rather than concentrating on motor speech production per se, may improve the effectiveness of teaching speech to these children. Therefore, the purpose of this experiment was to compare two different reinforcement conditions; one in which successive motor approximations of speech sounds were reinforced; and a "motivation" condition in which attempts to produce speech sounds were reinforced, without any motor shaping of speech. The results, replicated within a repeated reversal disign, showed that reinforcing speech attempts was more effective than reinforcing motor speech sounds with respect to (a) the children's interest, enthusiasm, happiness, and general behavior during treatment; and (b) improvements in the children's speech production. The results are discussed in terms of their relationship to the literature on normal parent-child speech interaction, success and failure, and learned helplessness.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1988 · doi:10.1007/BF02211871