Abstract
The mothers and fathers of 11 preschool autistic children were taught operant procedures used in teaching speech to nonverbal children. The children's speech skills were assessed twice before and once after their parents were trained. At posttreatment, the children showed significant gains in prespeech and speech skills as measured by a 21-step hierarchy of speech behaviors. Those children who had acquired at least verbal imitative skill after training made greater progress than those who had not. Although children maintained their gains in a 1-year follow-up assessment, there was no evidence of significant improvement beyond that achieved at the end of training. The importance of support for parents in continuing to do formal “teaching” after the training program ends was stressed.
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Support for this research came in part from a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (MH 29897-04) to the first author. Our thanks to Elayne Weitz, who co-led one of the groups, to Beverly Brysk for data processing, and to Rona Milch for statistical consultation.
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Harris, S.L., Wolchik, S.A. & Weitz, S. The acquisition of language skills by autistic children: Can parents do the job?. J Autism Dev Disord 11, 373–384 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01531613
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01531613