TIME DELAY: A TECHNIQUE TO INCREASE LANGUAGE USE AND FACILITATE GENERALIZATION IN RETARDED CHILDREN

James W. Halle, Ann M. Marshall, Joseph E. Spradlin

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Institutional breakfast‐serving procedures were manipulated to assess what effect changes in that aspect of the environment would have on requests for food. During baseline, six severely retarded children were required to pick up their food trays and return to their seats. The first manipulation, delaying the giving of the food tray for 15 seconds, served as a cue to evoke meal requests by three of the six children. Two of the remaining three required a model of an appropriate meal request (i.e., “Tray, please.”) at the end of the 15‐second delay before they began requesting their meals. To evoke meal requests from the sixth child, an intensive training procedure, consisting of massed trials of delay and modeling, was required. Three different probes were administered to assess generalization across the people serving the meals, across mealtimes, and across both people and mealtimes. Typically, generalized responding in these new situations could be prompted by use of the 15‐second delay procedure. Functional aspects of the delay procedure and its potential usefulness for evoking speech and facilitating generalization are discussed. 1979 Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)431-439
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of Applied Behavior Analysis
Volume12
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 1979
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • delay
  • generalization
  • incidental teaching
  • language
  • retarded children
  • stimulus control

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Philosophy
  • Applied Psychology
  • Sociology and Political Science

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