Increasing spontaneous verbal responding in autistic children using a time delay procedure.
A simple three-step pause-and-model routine teaches autistic children to ask for things without adult hints.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Seven autistic children joined a small teaching study.
The adult showed a toy, waited 0 s, then 5 s, then 10 s, then gave a spoken model like “Say car.”
Kids earned the toy only if they asked before the model.
Sessions ran in play areas, at tables, and in hallways.
What they found
Every child learned to ask for items on their own.
They kept asking with new toys, new adults, and new rooms.
No extra training was needed for these changes.
How this fits with other research
Jones et al. (1992) later grouped 36 time-delay studies and found the same: the prompt plan keeps working.
Lincoln et al. (1988) compared time delay to another prompt chain. Time delay won on speed, errors, and minutes.
Robertson et al. (2013) moved the work home. When parents praised every spontaneous request, problem behavior dropped.
Carnett et al. (2020) swapped voices for tablets. Kids learned “where” questions with a similar wait-and-cue plan.
Why it matters
You can add a 0-5-10 s pause to any play or snack routine today. Start with one highly preferred item. Wait. If the child stays quiet, model the word. Reinforce the first clear request. Track how many times you had to model. Drop the wait time as requests grow. This tiny schedule builds spontaneous language without extra staff or gear.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
One oft-cited problem with teaching speech skills to autistic children is the failure of the speech to be spontaneous. That is, the children's speech often remains under the control of the verbal behavior of others rather than under the control of other nonverbal referents in the environment. We investigated the effectiveness of a time delay procedure to increase the spontaneous speech of seven autistic children. Initially, the experiment presented a desired object (e.g., cookie) and immediately modeled the appropriate response "I want (cookie)." Gradually, as the child imitated the vocalization, the experimenter increased the time between presentation of the object and the modeled vocalization in an attempt to transfer stimulus control of the child's vocalization from the experimenter's model to the object. Results indicated that all the children learned to request items spontaneously and generalized this behavior across settings, people, situations, and to objects which had not been taught. These results are discussed in relation to the literature on spontaneous speech, prompting, and generalization.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1985 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1985.18-155