Using time delay to promote spontaneous speech in an autistic child.
A three-second pause after imitation sparks autistic kids to speak first during play.
01Research in Context
What this study did
One autistic child worked with a clinician in a playroom.
The adult first copied the child’s play sounds.
Then the adult waited three to five seconds before speaking again.
This short pause is called time delay.
The team tracked how often the child spoke first during play.
What they found
The child began to speak first more often during play.
Some of the new speech showed up later with other toys.
The gains did not stay high every week.
Overall, the pause after imitation helped spark new words.
How this fits with other research
Goldstein et al. (1991) ran the same 3-5 s pause with three boys at home.
Parents, not clinicians, gave the prompt.
All three kids also spoke more, showing the trick works in daily life.
Beaumont et al. (2008) stretched the pause to teach full play routines with peers.
Their target was social play, not just words.
Both teams still saw gains, so time delay scales beyond single words.
Schneider et al. (2006) swapped the pause for “wait and imitate” with dads.
Kids added more different words, proving the wider family can use the idea.
Why it matters
You already use echoic training.
After the child copies you, simply count “one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi” before you talk again.
That tiny wait gives the child a chance to lead with new speech.
Try it in play, snack, or walk routines.
No extra toys or data sheets needed.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →After the child echoes you, stay quiet for three seconds and look expectantly.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
One of the frequently observed deficits in autistic children is their lack of spontaneous speech. We used a multiple baseline across behaviors to investigate the effectiveness of a time delay procedure for inducing spontaneous speech in a 10-year-old male autistic child during play. We first taught the child to imitate the experimenter's verbal prompts that described the child's motor response. Once the child reached criteria on imitation, we implemented baseline wherein an immediate verbal prompt for speech was provided after each of the child's motor responses. Intervention consisted of a gradual delay in the presentation of the verbal prompts. The time delay effectively increased the child's spontaneous speech on trained items; some generalization to untrained items also occurred, but only within the same behavioral class of car play. Generalization was also observed across settings. Spontaneous speech remained at high levels during the 4-month maintenance for the behavior of car play but decreased for a second behavior. Decreases in the child's response latencies suggest that spontaneous speech may be an anticipatory verbal response.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1991 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1991.24-591