Although perseverative speech is a common characteristic of individuals with high-functioning neurodevelopmental disabilities, little is known about the operant functions of these verbalizations. We conducted analogue functional analyses of perseverative speech for 2 students using reinforcement contingencies that included alone, attention,…

This investigation sheds light on necessary and sufficient conditions to establish self-care behavior chains among people with developmental disabilities. First, a descriptive assessment (DA) identified the types of teaching errors that occurred during self-care instruction. Second, the relative effects of three teaching errors observed during the…

Angelman syndrome is a neurogenetic disorder characterized by intellectual and developmental disability. Common behavioral characteristics of this disorder include a heightened interest in social interactions and frequent bids to initiate interaction. These bids can be problematic, for instance, when a child attempts to hug strangers in public…

Least-to-most prompting hierarchies (e.g., progressing from verbal to modeled to physical prompts until the target response occurs) may be ineffective when the prompts do not cue the individual to attend to the relevant stimulus dimensions. In such cases, emission of the target response persistently requires one or more of the higher level…