verbal behavior By AV

As far as waiting for the child to respond, I would have to disagree with the previous reply. If we wait for an extended time for our children to respond you begin to build that wait time into their repetoire. If the child does not answer when you say, "What's your name?" You should prompt right away (within 2 seconds) and then ask again to transfer the trial into a independent response or give the next least prompt. Whatever the question or task you ask of the child you need to follow thru right away. We want our students to answer quickly and have fluency as well as generalization of skills.

Finally, all behavior does serve a function as you mentioned, but a functional behavior assessment needs to be conducted to ensure what the function of the behavior really is. He may be babbling just for attention, or maybe just sensory self stimulation in which case you need a higher reinforcing item(candy or something to give him when he is quiet) to compete with his immediate reinforcing behavior of babbling. There are only four functions of behavior: sensory, attention, escape, and tangible.

He may be babbling to escape momentarily from the task at hand....please do a FBA.