Fitting In Clinical Applications 5

Provding prompts for redirection, removal of attention, redirection

• Effective intervention for encouraging conversational speech and discouraging perseverative speech
• Use of extinction may be temporarily socially rejecting, but this is a natural consequence the individual already encounters when she engages in perseverative speech
• Will provide the opportunity to develop repertoires with other speech topics, has been demonstrated to increase appropriate speech
• Does not naturally generalize and will need to be practiced in other contexts with other people. If the behavior is responsive to the procedure with the therapist, then we may want to train family members to implement the procedure.
• The assumption, which was not tested, is that the individual may begin to access natural reinforcement from interactive conversations and then be less likely to use perseverative speech when talking to others.

maintenance

• Generalizing the intervention to other settings and people. Options might include training parents and siblings to implement at home.
• Will only be effective if perseverative speech is maintained by attention (the behavior analyst may decide to approach the perseverative speech as a skill deficit as opposed to problem behavior, thereby not confirming the function prior to intervention)
• Identifying speech prompts that the learner will respond to