TEACHING RECEPTIVE NAMING OF CHINESE CHARACTERS TO CHILDREN WITH AUTISM BY INCORPORATING ECHOLALIA

The facilitative effect of incorporating echolalia on teaching recepti ve naming of Chinese characters to children with autism was assessed. In Experiment 1, echoing the requested character name prior to the rec eptive naming task facilitated matching a character to its name. In ad dition, task performance was consistently maintained only when echolal ia preceded the receptive manual response. Positive results from gener alization tests suggested that learned responses occurred across vario us 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 character s. These results provide support for incorporating echolalia as an edu cational tool within language instruction for some children with autis m.