PIVOTAL RESPONSE TRAINING APPLIED TO A GRAMMATICALLY COMPLEX LANGUAGE: A CASE OF RAPID LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN A FOUR-YEAR-OLD FINNISH-SPEAKING CHILD WITH AUTISM

Background:  Pivotal Response Training (PRT) is a naturalistic behavioral (ABA) intervention approach combining traditional behavioral techniques with techniques known to facilitate early social-communicative behavior in typical children.

Objectives:  As PRT is very much about language, it seemed appropriate to analyze the language of a child immersed in the PRT program linguistically and grammatically. There is a need for linguistic and especially grammatical studies among the speakers with autism spectrum disorder.

Methods:  The subject is a 4-year-old echolalic autistic boy who was administered a total of 32 PRT sessions during a 3-month period. His verbal performance was analyzed from digitalized video recordings of his PRT therapy sessions. The sessions chosen for the present paper were the first two (Phase 1) and the final two sessions (Phase 2) of PRT therapy. The subject’s communicative verbal output was labeled as a prompted speech category with three subcategories: correct prompted reply, incorrect prompted reply and no reply. Spontaneous speech was classified into two subcategories: correct spontaneous speech and incorrect spontaneous speech.

Results:  The grammatical analysis of the subject’s speech shows a radical shift from single-word responses of Phase 1 to more complex structures of Phase 2. Unintended verbal behavior such as imitation, babbling and crying also diminished by Phase 2. Other developments in the subject’s spontaneous speech was also observed, e.g., a decrease of incorrect spontaneous speech from 51.1% (28/55) in Phase 1 to 17.8% (18/101) in Phase 2. Quantitatively, the total number of spontaneous speech attempts nearly doubled from 55 in Phase 1 to 101 in Phase 2.

Conclusions: The development from the one-word phrase stage to that of two-word phrases and further follows the path seen in typical children. Two language acquisition models describing the present child’s language development will be discussed.