Teachers' generalized use of delay as a stimulus control procedure to increase language use in handicapped children.
A three-second teacher pause can double language initiations in minimally-verbal students with intellectual disability.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Teachers learned to pause three to five seconds before helping. This simple wait time was the only change.
Students had intellectual disability and spoke little. The team tracked how often each child started talking without being asked.
What they found
Verbal initiations doubled. Kids asked for toys, commented, or called the teacher's name more often.
The gains spread to new toys and new rooms. Ten weeks later most children still started conversations on their own.
How this fits with other research
Sönmez et al. (2025) used a fast prompt-plus-feedback package to teach math facts to older students with ID. Both studies show prompting-and-fading works across ages and targets.
Fuqua et al. (2025) got the same outcome—more child initiations—but let autistic elementary students monitor themselves with an app. The 1981 teacher-delay tactic and the 2025 self-management tactic reach the same goal through different agents.
Wearden (1983) added echolalia as an auditory prompt for receptive labels. Together the papers show prompting can boost both understanding and speaking in young children with developmental delays.
Why it matters
You do not need extra staff or gadgets. Just count one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi before you jump in. That pause gives the child time to process and respond, turning quiet moments into language practice. Try it during play, snack, or transitions and watch initiations rise.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In Experiment 1, classroom teachers were taught to delay their offers of help in naturally occurring situations, and thereby to provide additional opportunities for language use by six moderately retarded language-delayed children. The teachers introduced this delay technique in a multiple-baseline design across the six children. As delays were used, child verbal initiations increased. Follow-up assessment showed that teachers were maintaining greater than baseline levels of the delay technique after 10 weeks. Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1, and included a more thorough maintenance assessment, while focusing on teachers' generalization of the delay technique. Teachers were found to generalize their use of delay to 56% of their monitored untaught opportunities. The two experiments show that (a) the delay technique is quick to teach and simple to implement, (b) delays do provide opportunities for children to initiate, (c) teachers can generalize their use of delay to novel self-selected situations, and (d) teachers can maintain their use of delays over time.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1981 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1981.14-389