Social interaction skills for children with autism: a script-fading procedure for beginning readers.

Engaging in spontaneous social exchanges is a central skill deficit of children with autism, and one that is often difficult to remediate. The 3 boys (ages 4, 4, and 5 years) who participated in this study had acquired small verbal repertoires, but typically spoke only when answering questions or requesting preferred edible items or toys, and did not converse with a familiar teacher during baseline. During teaching, textual cues ("Look" and "Watch me") were embedded in the youngsters' photographic activity schedules; after learning to use the scripts, the children's verbal elaborations and unscripted interactions increased and were maintained when a new recipient of interaction was introduced. After scripts were faded, unscripted interactions not only continued but also generalized to different activities that had not been the topic of teaching. The script-fading procedure enabled children with autism to converse with adults, to benefit from adults' language models, and to engage in language practice that contributes to fluency.

Procedures for teaching appropriate gestural communication skills to children with autism.

Four children with autism were taught to use gestures in combination with oral communication. Using a multiple-baseline across-responses design, intervention was introduced successively across three response categories containing gestures representative of attention-directing/getting, affective, and descriptive behavior. Although none of the participants displayed appropriate gestural and verbal responses during baseline, all participants acquired this skill with the systematic implementation of modeling, prompting, and reinforcement. Generalization measures indicated that the children learned to respond in the presence of novel stimuli and a novel setting. Social validity measures revealed that the participants' behavior appeared more socially appropriate at the completion of the study than at the start of the study, and that the participants' behavior was indistinguishable from that of their typically developing peers.

Training and generalization of affective behavior displayed by youth with autism.

The purpose of this study was to teach contextually appropriate affective behavior to 4 youths with autism. Treatment consisted of modeling, prompting, and reinforcement introduced in a multiple baseline design across response categories of affective behavior. During treatment, verbal praise and tokens were delivered contingent on appropriate affective responding during training trials. Modeling and verbal prompting were used as correction procedures. Each youth received treatment in either three or four response categories. Treatment systematically increased responding within the response categories for all 4 participants, with effects being specific to the affective response categories under treatment. Treatment effects occurred across untrained scenarios, therapists, time, and settings, suggesting that generalization had occurred.

Generalized imitation and response-class formation in children with autism.

An experimental analysis of imitation was conducted to examine the influence of response topography on generalization of imitation across three response types. Four children with autism were presented with both reinforced training trials and nonreinforced probe trials of models from vocal, toy-play, and pantomime response types. The probe trials were used to examine generalization within each response type. A multiple baseline design was used to analyze percentage of matching and nonmatching responses to models across response types. This study, the first to analyze imitative response classes in children with autism, showed that imitation generalized from reinforced training models to nonreinforced probe models within a response type, but it did not generalize across response types. Thus, functional response classes determined by topographical boundaries were exhibited within generalized imitation.

Sentence combining as a technique for increasing adjective use in writing by students with autism.

A multiple-baseline across-subjects design was used to determine whether reinforcement alone or in combination with sentence-combining exercises would increase the number of descriptive adjectives used in daily writing samples by three adolescents with autism. The cumulative number of new adjectives (adjectives never before used by a student in the entire study) was also recorded. Experimental conditions were baseline, sentence combining, and maintenance. Writing sessions consisted of a 20-min worksheet period followed by a 20-min writing period. The addition of sentence-combining exercises increased the number of adjectives in the students' writing samples. Maintenance of this increase occurred in the absence of sentence-combining lessons and in the presence of reinforcement for use of adjectives. The addition of sentence-combining exercises also increased the cumulative number of new adjectives, although new adjectives did not occasion reinforcement, and we had not expected their use to increase in students with autism without specific instruction. Maintenance of new adjective use also was demonstrated. Finally, for all three students, minimal terminable unit (T-unit) length, a measure that facilitates comparison with normative data, increased from baseline to maintenance, and independent raters judged writing samples written during maintenance as better than those written during baseline.

On systems analysis in autism intervention programs.

Although intervention technology has grown substantially during the past quarter century, the design of intervention systems has not grown apace. This paper examines organizational arrangements that enhance and diminish treatment effectiveness and argues that defining, measuring, and manipulating systemic antecedent and consequent variables are as important as assessment and intervention on an individual client's behalf.

Teaching children with autism to initiate to peers: effects of a script-fading procedure.

A script that was systematically faded from end to beginning was used to teach peer initiations about recently completed, current, and future activities. The effectiveness of the script-fading procedure was assessed via a multiple baseline design across 4 children with autism. During baseline, the children seldom initiated to peers, although all had previously acquired some functional expressive language and sometimes spontaneously addressed adults. When the script was introduced, peer initiations increased, and as the script was faded, unscripted initiations increased. With the minimal written prompts available in the final fading steps, initiations generalized to a different setting, time, teacher, and activity; and for 3 of the 4 children, peer initiations were maintained at a 2-month follow-up. After the script was faded, the participants' levels of peer initiations were within the same range as a normative sample of 3 nondisabled youngsters. The script-fading procedure enabled children with severe social and verbal deficits to practice context-specific, peer-directed generative language that was not prompted by adults or peer confederates.

Programming participation in family activities for children with autism: parents' use of photographic activity schedules.

The parents of 3 boys with autism were taught to help their children follow photographic activity schedules depicting a variety of home-living tasks. A multiple baseline across participants showed that the home-based intervention produced increases in children's engagement and social initiations and decreases in disruptive behavior, which were maintained for as long as 10 months.

Teaching children with autism to use photographic activity schedules: maintenance and generalization of complex response chains.

We used a graduated guidance procedure to teach 4 boys with autism to follow photographic activity schedules to increase on-task and on-schedule behavior. The multiple baseline across participants design included baseline, teaching, maintenance, resequencing of photographs, and generalization to novel photographs phases. The results indicated that photographic activity schedules (albums depicting after-school activities) produced sustained engagement, and skills generalized to a new sequence of photographs and to new photographs. The acquisition of schedule-following skills enabled these children with severe developmental disabilities to display lengthy response chains, independently change activities, and change activities in different group home settings in the absence of immediate supervision and prompts from others.

Assessing and improving child care: a personal appearance index for children with autism.

An index of children's physical appearance and personal care was developed and used to assess youngsters with autism who lived (a) at home, (b) in an established group home, (c) in new group homes, and (d) in a large institution. Subsequently, a multiple baseline design across participants documented major changes in personal appearance and cleanliness when children moved from an institution to community-based, family-style group homes. Finally, data-based feedback generated by the appearance index was used as a training tool enabling group home staff to further improve child appearance. This research demonstrates how an evaluation instrument can be used to obtain comparative data, measure some effects of different residential placements, and provide ongoing feedback to caregivers to promote high standards of personal care among persons with severe developmental disabilities.

An extension of incidental teaching procedures to reading instruction for autistic children.

In an extension of incidental teaching procedures to reading instruction, two autistic children acquired functional sight-word reading skills in the context of a play activity. Children gained access to preferred toys by selecting the label of the toy in tasks requiring increasingly complex visual discriminations. In addition to demonstrating rapid acquisition of 5-choice discriminations, they showed comprehension on probes requiring reading skills to locate toys stored in labeled boxes. Also examined was postteaching transfer across stimulus materials and response modalities. Implications are that extensions of incidental teaching to new response classes may produce the same benefits documented in communication training, in terms of producing generalization concurrent with skill acquisition in the course of child-preferred activities.

The facilitative effects of incidental teaching on preposition use by autistic children.

In a comparison of incidental teaching and traditional training procedures, three language-delayed autistic children were taught expressive use of prepositions to describe the location of preferred edibles and toys. Traditional highly structured training and incidental teaching procedures were used in a classroom setting, and generalization was assessed during free-play sessions. Results clearly indicate that incidental teaching promoted greater generalization and more spontaneous use of prepositions. These findings have important implications for language programming and teacher training, suggesting that incidental teaching should be included as a standard component of language development curricula for autistic and other developmentally delayed children.

Conversational skills for autistic adolescents: teaching assertiveness in naturalistic game settings.

A naturalistic social skills training program was used to teach assertive responses to three autistic adolescents. Training and assessment of positive and negative assertions occurred in the context of two game situations-a card game and a ball game. Training consisted of modeling and behavioral rehearsal prior to each game, with tokens delivered contingent on assertive responses. Evaluation of training effects was accomplished in a multiple baseline across response classes. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the procedure in generating high levels of positive and negative assertions that maintained across a 4.5-month follow-up interval. This in vivo procedure for teaching social behaviors permits the concurrent acquisition of assertive responses and leisure behaviors, two skills that are of special importance in improving the quality of autistic youth's experiences with their peers.

A modified incidental-teaching procedure for autistic youth: acquisition and generalization of receptive object labels.

A modified incidental-teaching procedure was used to increase the receptive language skills of autistic youth who had previously experienced lengthy institutionalization. At the time of the study, the two severely language-delayed children had recently been transitioned to a community-based group home. Receptive-labeling skills were taught for four sets of objects typically used in school lunch preparation. The percentage of correct, unprompted object identifications displayed by Youth 1 increased when the incidental-teaching package (gestural prompts, behavior-specific praise, and contingent access to lunch-making supplies) was sequentially introduced in a multiple-baseline design across sets of objects. These results were replicated with Youth 2. The youths' newly acquired language skills also generalized to a different setting (the dining room of the group home) and to a different activity occurring later in the day (a traditional sit-down, discrete-trial session). This research indicates that the linguistic skills of severely developmentally delayed autistic children can be accelerated by incidental instruction that is provided in the course of shaping other home-living skills.