Reducing Palilalia by Presenting Tact Corrections to Young Children with Autism

Abstract

Palilalia, the delayed repetition of words or phrases, occurs frequently among individuals with autism and developmental disabilities. The current study used a combined multiple baseline and reversal design to investigate the effectiveness of presenting tacts as corrections for palilalia. During baseline, five preschoolers with autism emitted high rates of palilalia and low rates of mands and tacts during play and instructional activities. During treatment, when experimenters presented opportunities to echoically tact actions and objects following the emission of palilalia, its frequency decreased to low and stable levels and mands and tacts increased. Functional relationships between the tact corrections and emissions of palilalia, mands, and tacts were established during reversals to baseline and treatment conditions. Similar trends in responding were found for frequency of palilalia, mands, and tacts in non-treatment settings.

Two Forms Of Spoken Repetition In A Girl With Autism

“…Tourette's syndrome, acquired aphasias), but which has not been generally discussed in relation to ASD. An exception is Karmali (2000), who identifies four young children exhibiting both palilalia and 'characteristics of autism'.…”

“…The possibility that repeated talk provides resources for both impaired speakers and those interacting with them has underpinned the handful of CA case studies of children with an ASD. Local and Wootton (1995) note that 'unusual echoes' are routinely treated by a co-participating adult as non-meaningful. Despite this, they show that the child's ('Kevin') co-participants used forms of turn design which encouraged the child to produce repeats of the utterance.…”

The Induction of Naming in Children with No Prior Tact Responses as a Function of Multiple Exemplar Histories of Instruction

“…Research based on Skinner's (1957) theory has proliferated in recent years and has contributed to the identification of procedures for inducing verbal operants in children who are missing them. Much of this experimentation has focused on the dependence and interdependence of the classes of verbal repertoires (Becker, 1989;Greer, Nuzzolo-Gomez, Ross, & Rivera-Valdez, 2005;Lamarre & Holland, 1985;Lodhi & Greer, 1989;Michael, 1982;Twyman, 1996aTwyman, , 1996bYoon, 1998), the variables that functionally control verbal operants (Chu, 1998;Karmali, Greer, Nuzzolo-Gomez, Ross, & Rivera-Valdes, 2005;Ross & Greer, 2003;Sundberg, Michael, Partington, & Sundberg, 1996;Tsiouri & Greer, 2003;Williams & Greer, 1993), and studies testing several theoretical explanations for, and the source of, productive verbal repertoires (Greer & Keohane, 2005;Greer & Ross, 2004;Greer, Stolfi, Chavez-Brown, & Rivera-Valdez, 2005;Greer, Yuan, & Gautreaux, 2005;Horne & Lowe, 1996;Ross & Greer, 2003). One source of verbal behavior that has been identified in the literature is naming.…”

Effects of a treatment package on the on task behavior of a kindergartener with autism across settings.

“…Other research has shown that there are effective tactics to increase "on task" academic behaviors involving self-management (Callahan & Rademacher, 1999;Stahmer & Schreibman, 1992), the reduction of inappropriate behavior (Tasky, Rudrud, Schulze, & Rapp, 2008;Machlicek, O'Reilly, Beretvas, Sigafoos, & Lancioni, 2007), and improvements in verbal behavior and reducing palalalia behaviors in children with autism and behavior disorders (Greer & Ross, 2008;Karmali, Greer, Nuzzolo-Gomez, Ross, & Valdes, 2005;Mancina, Tankersley, Kamps, Kravits, & Parrett, 2000). Conroy, Asmus, Sellers, & Ladwig (2005) successfully taught a six-year-old boy to discriminate times in the day at school where stereotypic behaviors were acceptable and not acceptable using an antecedent based intervention involving visual cuecards.…”