Researchers widely assert that requiring eye contact from students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) before instruction is highly important to the outcome of teaching (Greer and Ross in Verbal behavior analysis, Pearson Education, New York, 2008; Lovaas in J Consult Clin Psychol 55(1):3-9, 1977. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006x.55.1.3).…

This study compared simultaneous prompting with an error correction procedure for teaching three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder expressive labels. Using a parallel treatment design nested within a multiple probe design, the researchers taught each participant how to expressively label pictures of sports teams or cartoon…

Objectives: This study investigates the effects of assistive technology on improving communication skills of children with autism. Methods: Twelve children with autism (mean age=8 years) randomly assigned to either experimental groups or a control group (n=4 per group). The study confirmed validity and stability for the language skills scale for…

Young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often demonstrate delays in expressive communication, impacting their ability to independently function in typical environments. Individuals with ASD who develop expressive language during early childhood experience better outcomes later in life; therefore, examination of naturalistic language…

Combining data from a series of three planned consecutive randomized controlled trials, the present study investigates two literacy interventions for preschool children with autism spectrum disorder. For the first cohort, children were randomized to interactive book reading (IBR; treatment) or business as usual (BAU; control); in Cohort 2,…

Therapists and educators frequently teach alternative-communication systems, such as picture exchanges or manual signs, to individuals with developmental disabilities who present with expressive language deficits. Michael (1985) recommended a taxonomy for alternative communication systems that differentiated between selection-based systems in…

We analyzed several studies of non-verbal communication (prosody and facial expressions) completed in our lab and conducted a secondary analysis to compare performance on receptive vs. expressive tasks by adolescents with ASD and their typically developing peers. Results show a significant between-group difference for the aggregate score of…

The study compared the effectiveness of a peer model and an adult model in teaching an expressive language task to four autistic boys (ages 7-10). Results indicated that all children learned from both models and few consistent differences occurred across the two conditions. Generalization and maintenance was also consistently high in both…

Incidental teaching and traditional discrete-trial procedures were used to teach two children (ages 10 and 12) with autism the expressive use of two color adjectives. Results demonstrated that traditional discrete-trial teaching was more efficient and produced faster acquisition but incidental teaching resulted in greater generalization and equal…

Review of literature on indicators of the effectiveness of language intervention programs for autistic children showed that mitigation in echolalia was a critical characteristic, as it implied that the prerequisites for language were accessible through speech. Children whose speech ranged from mutism to unmitigated echolalia had a more negative…

Results of a study with four autistic students (ages five-nine) showed that a picture training procedure was effective in teaching a generalized response to questions for which the relevant cue was visible, whereas specific generalization programing was required for situations in which the relevant cue was not visible. (Author/DB)

Incorporated motivational procedures to teach question-asking to three children (ages three and five). All children learned to use questions in relation to items they had previously been unable to label and demonstrated generalization of spontaneous question-asking to new items and to their home environments with their mothers, with concomitant…

This paper discusses the outcomes of a study that investigated whether applying the discrete-trial approach is effective in teaching children with autism to learn functional and pre-academic skills. Participants were four young children with autism (ages 3-4) attending a preschool special education program of an urban public school. Discrete-trial…

This study evaluated ease of learning 5 visual symbol sets (photopictorial, rebus, Blissymbolics, orthography, and Premack-type tokens) with 4 autistic students (ages 7-13). A second article describes the development of instructional procedures for the students, noting the contribution of behavioral, cognitive developmental, and information…

Joint attention refers to an early developing set of behaviors that plays a critical role in both social and language development and is specifically impaired in children with autism. In a series of three studies, preschool teachers demonstrated the effectiveness of discrete trial instruction and pivotal response training strategies to teach joint…