For some children with autism receiving EIBI the acquisition of the first expressive words is a great challenge, and some children never develop a functional expressive repertoire. And there has been investigated several techniques for facilitating those first words; non-verbal imitation, physical prompting etc. In this issue of Journal of Autism and other Developmental Disorders (39) Kogel, Shirotova and Koegel has published a paper titled “Brief Report: Using Individualized Orienting Cues to Facilitate First-Word Acquisition in Non-Responders with Autism“.
This study investigatet whether individualized orienting cues could be identified, and wehter their presentation would result in vergal expressive words, and the results indicates that the use of orienting cues increased corredt responding to verbal models as well as subsequent word use. This study contributes to increase the research on techniques that praticioners can use with those children who do not show fuctional speach, and will by that be a useful contribution.
This article is published on open access, stating which positively increase the availibility.
As social deficits are one of the main impairments with children with autism spectrum disorders, there has been put a large effort in developing effective interventions in this area. And the later years the focus has been on the early social development, as they appear to be crucial for the normal development of children.
Another focus has been on embedding the intervention into more typical environments and one central element of this has bee the incorporation of natural rewards. This has shown to strengthen the response-reinforcer relationship and are especially helpful in encouraging social communication (e.g. Koegel and Koegel, 2006).
In a recent study by Koegel, Vernon and Koegel published in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders the effect of embedding social interactions into reinforcers on social initiations in children with autism was investigated. The data from this study support the notion that embedded social interaction in reinforcers increases several important early social behaviors.
As not all children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) reach the same outcome of behavioral treatment, there has been a lot of work done to identify predictors both for which children will benefit the most from behavioral treatment.
This research has historically investigated both skills or deficits the children possesses before treatment starts, and some elements of the early learning style. There is done quite a lot of work on Early Learning Measures (ELM). None of this research has come up with concluding results, so it´s important to get more research done in this area.
Schreibman and colleagues has done some research in this area in the recent years, specially within the framework of Pivotal Response Training, and has now published a study in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders.
This is an important area of research that need more attention. More knowledge in this area will make pratcioners able to offer and design better programs based on each individuals unique characteristics, and probably contribute to the understanding of how the different components of behavioral programs contribute to great results.
The last article for this number of Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders I´m going to write about on this site it the Review article published by Christopher Rayner, Carey Denholm and Jegg Sigafoos: “Video-based intervention for individuals with autism: Key questions that remain unanswered.”
The authors has reviewed earlier published reviews to assess the current state of research on the use of Video-based interventions (VBI) for children with autism. And as expected they find evidence for the effectiveness of VBI, but as the interventions as a group are quite new, there are several key questions that needs to be addressed to refine and establish VBI.
VBI are from my experience quite effective, but requires a lot of preparations and are therefor quite time consuming and require a lot of work on the therapists side; preparing the videos (filming, editing, etc..). So if the key questions outlined in this article could be answered, the interventions could be more pinpointed and effective, and probably the work required for preparation less…
Traditionally I have been teaching imitation to early learners through Discrete Trails. But often I find that this requires a lot of prompting and that the trainers must have very precise prompting and prompt fading skills. They rarely do, as they are early learners as well as the child with autism. This makes the initial and very important teaching of learning skills takes more time than necessary.
Today I was visiting several early and young learners to supervise on the ABA-program, and I tried to implement the imitation training based on the children´s initiative, and providing the natural consequences as reinforcers. It worked like a charm, and all the children started imitation simple motor actions. One with object, one gross motor and even fine motor actions. But for some of the children I had to supplement with arbitrary reinforcers to uphold responding, even if the initiative came from the child…. But this may is to be faded, such as the prompts.
This was a great experience that I think will chance the way a start ABA-programs; it will be limited discrete trail teaching in the early periods of the ABA-program. But I will try to collect some data on the difference before I change all..
The downside of this as I see it, and experience it – it´s harder to teach new trainers to do applied behavior analysis based on the natural environment and the child´s initiative, than to teach them to do discrete trails…. It require more knowledge and understanding of behavior analysis, and the skills has to be fluent to take advantage of every situation to teach new skills! And the collection of data is even harder…
But maybe we should spend more time on preparing and teaching the staff before the program starts?
Recent Comments