BEHAVIORAL MOMENTUM AND STIMULUS FADING IN THE ACQUISITION AND MAINTENANCE OF CHILD COMPLIANCE IN THE HOME

The provision of a series of requests to which compliance is highly likely (high-probability requests) immediately antecedent to low-probability requests has been used to establish behavioral momentum of compliance. We evaluate a fading procedure for maintaining high levels of compliance obtained with high-probability requests. Fading involved a systematic reduction in the number of high-probability requests and an increase in the latency between the high- and low-probability requests. High levels of compliance for both ''do'' and ''don't'' requests were maintained for 16 weeks in a 5-year-old boy with developmental disabilities after the high-probability request sequence was faded. Similar maintenance was obtained for ''do'' requests in a 15-year-old girl with developmental disabilities. For this subject, however, the high-probability request sequence was ineffective with ''don't'' requests. When ''don't'' requests were phrased as ''do'' requests, the high-probability request sequence produced high levels of compliance to the low-probability request. High levels of compliance to these ''do'' requests were maintained for 16 weeks after the high-probability request sequence was faded.