Eleven typically developing children were assessed on the accuracy of prompted self-echoic responses following a 5-s delay from their initial echoic response, replicating procedures in Esch, Esch, McCart, and Petursdottir (2010) that compared discrepancies between echoic and self-echoic scores of autistic and typically developing children…

Several studies have demonstrated effects of stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) on children's vocalizations, but numerous treatment failures have also been reported. The present study attempted to isolate procedural variables related to failures of SSP to condition speech sounds as reinforcers. Three boys diagnosed with autism-spectrum disorders…

In the behavioral literature, self-echoic behavior has been hypothesized to play an important role in, for example, emergent conditional discriminations (e.g., Lowenkron, 1991), emergent verbal operants (Horne & Lowe, 1996), and problem solving (Skinner, 1957). Although early behavioral intervention programs for children with autism emphasize the…

Variability has been demonstrated to be an operant dimension of behavior (Neuringer, 2002; Page & Neuringer, 1985). Recently, lag schedules have been used to demonstrate operant variability of verbal behavior in persons with a diagnosis of autism (e.g., Lee, McComas, & Jawor, 2002). The current study evaluated the effects of a Lag 1 schedule on…