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Teaching prelinguistic communication skills to school age children with autism

Prelinguistic Milieu Teaching (PMT) is an intervention designed to teach young
children to initiate nonverbal communication using vocalizations, gestures, and eye-gaze.
Children are taught through social routines in their natural environment. Techniques
include contriving an environment in which the children will be motivated to
communicate and using a hierarchy of prompting and modeling to evoke the desired
communicative behaviors, such as requesting and commenting. PMT has been
previously studied in young children (ages 1-5) with developmental delays. In this study,
it is implemented with six school-age children with Autism (ages 5-8). A multiple
baseline design across participants was used to evaluate the effects of the intervention on
the variables of frequency, clarity, and maintenance of the participants’ communication.
All six participants showed increases in the targeted prelinguistic communication skills during treatment and maintained the increases during follow-up. Analysis of individual
behavioral profiles was helpful for disambiguating individual differences in response to
intervention across the three variables. Future research should target generalization of
learned behaviors across implementers and settings. / text

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/7520
Date27 May 2010
CreatorsFranco, Jessica Hetlinger
Source SetsUniversity of Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Formatelectronic
RightsCopyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works.

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