Teaching Conversational Interactions to Children with Autism

Children with autism (ASD) often struggle as conversation partners. The current study aimed to teach children with ASD to sustain conversational behavior with an adult experimenter. The study was conducted on the basis of Kantor’s Psychological Linguistics and Bijou et al.’s set of procedures developed for identifying and analyzing referential interactions. The purpose of the study was to examine the utility of the identified unit of analysis “continuations” in combination with a social reinforcement contingency to increase the referential interactions of two young children with ASD. An alternating treatments design across behaviors was used with initial baseline sessions to assess the effects of CS and CL training. Results indicated that this analysis and unit of measure may be useful for teaching children with ASD to sustain referential interactions