Leung, J., & Wu, K. (1997).
Teaching receptive naming of Chinese characters by incorporating echolalia to children with autism.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,
30, 59-67.
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.
DESCRIPTORS: autism, echolalia, Chinese characters, receptive
naming, generalization