Assessment and treatment of vocal stereotypy associated with television: a pilot study.

A team worked with one six-year-old boy with autism. His vocal stereotypy happened every time the television was on.

They kept the TV on and paid the boy for sitting quietly. The payment came on a variable-interval schedule. That means he got a small treat after random, unpredictable amounts of time spent sitting.

The boy’s loud, repetitive sounds dropped while the show kept playing. Sitting earned reinforcement, so the stereotypy lost time and faded away.

Greenlee et al. (2024) later built a fuller package. They added brief awareness training, DRO, and schedule thinning. Their method cut motor stereotypy by 99% in five preschoolers. The 2013 pilot used only one piece of that puzzle—VI reinforcement of sitting—so the newer study supersedes it.

Scully et al. (2023) pushed the idea even younger. They used redirection plus reinforcement with a ten-month-old at-risk infant. Both studies show differential reinforcement works across ages and stereotypy types.

Esposito et al. (2021) tried a different route. They taught a seven-year-old to use red and green cards as cues for when stereotypy was okay. Vocal stereotypy still dropped, proving multiple roads lead to the same goal.

You can keep the TV, tablet, or music on and still cut vocal stereotypy. Pick a simple, quiet behavior like sitting and reinforce it on a lean VI schedule. Start with short intervals and stretch them out. If you need faster or bigger drops, layer in DRO or matched stimuli as later studies show.