This study examined the effects of presession attention on the acquisition of tacts (Experiment 1) and intraverbals (Experiment 2) in children diagnosed with autism. Each participant experienced 3 conditions. In the first 2 conditions, participants experienced a 15-min interval of either presession attention (PA) or no presession attention (NPA)…

Studies that have compared the effectiveness of differing prompt types to teach intraverbal responses have yielded mixed results, suggesting that individuals' reinforcement histories with prompt types may influence which prompt will be most effective. The purpose of this study was to test whether programmed increases in exposure to specific prompt…

Although experimental analysis methodologies have been useful for identifying the function of a wide variety of target behaviors (e.g., Iwata, Dorsey, Slifer, Bauman, & Richman, 1982/1994), only recently have such procedures been applied to verbal operants (Lerman et al., 2005). In the current study, we conducted a systematic replication of the…