Video modeling interventions have been mostly effective for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in teaching social communication skills. However, differences in the effectiveness of these interventions have been noted. Participant motivation was suggested as one of the factors that can influence the effectiveness of video modeling. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of participant motivation on video modeling for teaching social communication skills to individuals with ASD. A combined multiple probe across participants and adapted alternating treatments design was used to examine the differential effects of two video modeling conditions (i.e., motivated and non-motivated) on social communication skills of four adults with ASD. Of the four participants, three participants responded to the intervention and performed more of target behavior during the motivated video modeling condition than the non-motivated video modeling condition, while one did not respond to the intervention. In addition, the three participants engaged in a higher percentage of the target behavior during motivated generalization sessions than non-motivated generalization sessions. The results demonstrated that participant motivation influenced the effectiveness of video modeling.

Children with language impairment (LI) often demonstrate difficulties in social communication. Although a number of general social communication interventions have been suggested, there is relatively little work done to examine the efficacy of these interventions for school-age children with LI, and none reported to target general emotional competence. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects on teacher perception of an intervention designed to improve emotion understanding. The intervention was centered on the presentation and use of children's stories to introduce and practice aspects of emotion understanding. The withdrawn and sociable subscales of the Teacher Behavior Rating Scale (TBRS) were selected as variables on which to measure teacher perception. Following treatment five of the six participants scored higher ratings of prosocial behavior, with two demonstrating overall reductions in withdrawn behavior and increases in sociable behavior. For one of these participants, the reported progress was notable. The most positive indicator of change following treatment was the reduction in solitary-active withdrawal behavior reported for three of the participants. A reduction in this type of behavior would most likely have an important impact on the quality of social interactions experienced by these individuals.

Recent research indicates that many children with Language Impairment (LI) have difficulty with social communication skills. This study assessed the impact of a social communication intervention on teacher perceptions of social withdrawal in children who received the treatment. The intervention targeted emotion understanding using the presentation of children's stories, facial picture cards, and journaling. Teacher perception was measured using the three withdrawal subscales of the Teacher Behavior Rating Scale (TBRS): Solitary-Active withdrawal, Solitary-Passive withdrawal, and Reticence. Following treatment all five participants received lower ratings of withdrawn behavior on some of the subscales. Only one participant received a rating indicting increased withdrawn behavior (on a single subscale). The most positive indicators of change following treatment were the reduction in Solitary-Active withdrawal for three of the participants and the reduction of Reticent withdrawal for three participants. This study reveals promising results for social communication intervention in children with LI in the area of withdrawn behaviors.

Research has shown that children with Language Impairment (LI) struggle with social communication skills in addition to their characteristic syntactic difficulties. This pilot study analyzed the potential change in grammatical complexity in narratives of five children with LI when enrolled in a social communication intervention. The intervention itself focused on teaching emotion understanding by reading and reenacting children’s stories and journaling. Grammatical limitations were indirectly addressed by clinician modeling of complex forms during the intervention sessions. Each child’s productions were assessed and analyzed for grammatical complexity during retelling a book in the Mercer Mayer “a boy, a dog, and a frog” series. The children performed this task once a week during the course of the intervention. Specific measures used included the average length of terminable unit (T-unit) and the number of subordinate clauses used in each narrative. Three students’ productions remained steady throughout the course of the interventions; their grammatical complexity neither increased nor decreased. One student’s production showed a clear decrease in complexity but was explained by an obvious and arguably more creative change in her language output. One student’s grammatical complexity increased throughout the sessions as indicated by a steady increase in the average length of T-unit. Thus, the results of this study were equivocal. There were several limitations, however, that might be addressed in future intervention studies.

The Children's Communication Checklist-Second Edition (CCC-2) is a behavior rating scale developed to address the difficulties of assessing social communication in children. It was designed to be completed by a parent rater. However, since it would be helpful to know the extent to which ratings are context-dependent, this study looked at the agreement between parent and teacher ratings on the CCC-2 as well as the percent agreement on the severity of disorder. Twelve parent-teacher pairs completed the CCC-2 for children who had a documented developmental language disorder with specific impairment in social communication. Cohen's kappas, Cohen's weighted kappas, and percent agreement of severity of disorder were calculated. Kappa results ranged from less than chance agreement to fair agreement. When differentiating between scores that represent disorder and no disorder, parent and teacher percent agreement for the CCC-2 10 subscales range from 42% to 75%. Further delineation between no disorder, disorder, or severe disorder yielded percent agreement ranging from 17% to 50%. Overall percent agreement on the general communication composite was 92%. Results indicate that while parents and teachers have poor to fair agreement on the exact nature of a child's social communication strengths and weaknesses, they largely agree when a social communication problem exists. Lack of agreement likely resulted from the parent and teacher seeing the child in different contexts which required a somewhat different set of social communication abilities, or a difference in rater perception of what is within the developmental norms. These findings suggest that the best indication of a child's social communication profile may lie in a holistic assessment of performance in all the important contexts in a child's life, including school and home.

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<p>Early detection and characterization of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be improved by incorporating ecologically valid methods into ASD screening and assessment, capitalizing on prospective monitoring of high-risk populations, and targeting highly informative ASD features that emerge early in development. The present study aims to address these barriers by characterizing early vocal and pre-linguistic communication features present during naturalistic behavior samples of young children with neurogenetic syndromes (NGS). Participants were 39 children aged 5-30 months diagnosed with an NGS and 39 children aged 4-26 months at low risk for developmental delays. Participants completed a daylong audio recording of child vocalizations from which measures of early vocal features (child vocalization rate, canonical babbling ratio, and pitch variability) were obtained. Participants and their mothers also completed an unstructured play-based task during which pre-linguistic communicative features (communication complexity and function) were coded. We first used Bayesian analyses to compare the early vocal and pre-linguistic communication features of children with NGS to those of children at low risk for developmental delays. Children with NGS used less canonical babble, lower communication complexity overall and for behaviors for the purposes of joint attention. Next, we conducted a cluster analysis of early vocal and pre-linguistic communication features using the full sample of NGS and low-risk participants. The selected model identified 6 clusters that were primarily differentiated by canonical babbling and communicative function. These clusters differentiated participants beyond risk status, chronological age and adaptive age. Furthermore, certain clusters reflected differences in adaptive communication and socialization skills that may be relevant to early ASD profiles. These findings suggest that canonical babble and communicative function provide meaningful information about early developmental risk and may be useful to incorporate into the ASD screening and diagnostic processes.</p>