Teaching receptive naming of Chinese characters to children with autism by incorporating echolalia.
Letting an echolalic child say the name first makes receptive naming faster and more stable.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with children with autism who echoed words.
They wanted the kids to match Chinese characters to their names.
Before each trial the child echoed the character name, then pointed to the correct card.
What they found
Echoing first raised correct matches.
The gains held when new characters were added.
Kids kept the skill after the echo step was removed.
How this fits with other research
Wearden (1983) did the same thing 14 years earlier with object labels and got the same boost.
Delamater et al. (1986) looks like a clash—they stamped out echolalia to teach answers.
The fight is fake: J worked with mute adults who had no words, while P used kids who already echoed.
Xie et al. (2023) backs the idea that echoes serve a purpose; they show preschoolers using them to name and describe.
Why it matters
If your learner echoes, let them say the label right before the receptive task.
It costs no extra time and can speed up naming of pictures, objects, or even sight words.
Try it for one target set in your next session and track correct selections.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The facilitative effect of incorporating echolalia on teaching receptive naming of Chinese characters to children with autism was assessed. In Experiment 1, echoing the requested character name prior to the receptive naming task facilitated matching a character to its name. In addition, task performance was consistently maintained only when echolalia preceded the receptive manual response. Positive results from generalization tests suggested that learned responses occurred across various novel conditions. In Experiment 2, we examined the relation between task difficulty and speed of acquisition. All 3 participants achieved 100% correct responding in training, but learning less discriminable characters took more trials than learning more discriminable characters. These results provide support for incorporating echolalia as an educational tool within language instruction for some children with autism.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1997 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1997.30-59