Acquisition of intraverbal behavior: teaching children with autism to mand for answers to questions.

Four boys with autism were taught via echoic prompting and constant prompt delay to mand for answers to questions by saying "I don't know please tell me" (IDKPTM). This intervention resulted in acquisition of the IDKPTM response for all 4 participants and in acquisition of correct answers to most of the previously unknown questions for 2 participants. For 1 participant, tangible reinforcement resulted in increased frequency of correct answers, and direct prompting of correct answers was eventually conducted for the final participant. The IDKPTM response generalized to untargeted unknown questions with 3 participants. Results of person and setting generalization probes varied, but some generalization eventually occurred for all participants following additional training or interspersal of probe trials with training trials.