Using Antecedent and Functional Analyses to Conduct a Treatment Comparison on Echolalia

Immediate echolalia is a communication excess often associated with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Most studies evaluating immediate echolalia have focused on antecedent manipulations to address deficits in stimulus control. However, most research on function-based interventions for immediate echolalia has focused on antecedent analyses to hypothesize the potential maintaining variable, without including a functional analysis (FA) to formally evaluate the maintaining variable of immediate echolalia. The purpose of the current study was to extend the antecedent analyses that have been previously used to develop interventions for immediate echolalia and determine if a maintaining variable for immediate echolalia could be determined through a functional analysis. In the second phase of the study, an alternating treatments design was used to compare the effectiveness of a nonfunction based intervention to a function-based intervention.