Conversational skills for autistic adolescents: An autistic peer as prompter

✍ Scribed by Patricia J. Krantz; Steven E. Rams Land; Lynn E. McClannahan

• Book ID: 102759602
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1989
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 955 KB
• Volume: 4
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1072-0847
• DOI: 10.1002/bin.2360040303

✦ Synopsis

In this study, an autistic youth served as peer prompter for three other autistic adolescents. The peer prompter encouraged the other boys to talk about sports, a topic frequently discussed by typical teenagers. A multiple-baseline design across participants was used to assess the effectiveness of the peer-prompting procedure. During baseline, the youth rarely talked about sports, although all three had previously completed a sports-appreciation class and had displayed large pre-to-post gains on a paper-and-pencil test. During intervention, when a peer prompted sports discussions, all three youth engaged in much more sports-related conversation. Generalization measures indicated that: (1) the youth engaged in sports discussions in groups, as well as in the dyads that characterized the training situation; (2) they talked about sports in a setting other than the training setting; (3) they discussed sports with their peers when an unfamiliar teacher was present; and (4) they continued to discuss sports when training tapes and behavioral contracts between the teacher and the peer prompter were withdrawn. Previously, it has been common t o use nonhandicapped or less-handicapped peers as tutors; this study demonstrates that an autistic youth may also effectively serve as a prompter who assists his schoolmates in acquiring conversational skills that contribute t o their normalization.