Comparing Echoic Prompts and Echoic Prompts Plus Modeled Prompts on Teaching Beginning Conversational Language

Background: Some children with autism may struggle to develop conversational skills. In order to teach conversational language to children with autism, some clinicians begin by teaching simple back and forth exchanges (e.g., after someone says "ready, set" the child responds "go" or when asked "how are you?" the child responds "fine"). Some literature has supported the use of various prompting strategies to teach these conversational exchanges (Finkel & Williams, 2001; Goldsmith, LeBlanc, & Sautter, 2007; Vedora & Meunier, 2009).  These prompting strategies investigated in previous literature often involve the use of picture prompts, vocal prompts, or a combination of the two.  For some children, these prompts may be ineffective and it may be necessary to investigate the use of alternative prompting strategies to teach simple conversational exchanges. For children with have a history of communicating with sign language, it is possible that modeled prompts may be effective because the child has a history of communicating with motor movements.

 Objectives:  The purpose of the current study is to compare vocal prompts only with vocal prompts plus a modeled prompt to teach beginning vocal conversational language to a female adolescent with autism and Down syndrome with a history of sign language training. 

Methods:  One 13-year 9-month old female diagnosed with autism and Down syndrome attending a behavioral program participated in the study.  A modified alternating treatments design with a repeated A-B design across stimuli was used to compare two prompting procedures to a control condition. The two prompting procedures compared included vocal prompts only and vocal prompts paired with modeled prompts.  Six questions were chosen and were placed into two sets.  Set one included three questions each assigned to a different teaching method:  “What do you throw?” (ball), “What do you swim in?” (pool), “What can you drive?” (car).  Set two also included three questions, each assigned to a different teaching method: “What goes with socks?” (shoes), “What goes with spoon?” (bowl), and “What goes with brush?” (hair). 

Results:  The results indicated that the participant acquired responses assigned to the vocal prompts paired with modeled prompts condition more quickly than those responses assigned to the control condition and the vocal prompt only condition. 

 Conclusions:  The results of the current findings had particular clinical significance for the participant.  Teachers were instructed to use modeled prompts to augment echoic prompts when teaching simple conversational exchanges.  The addition of a modeled prompt (a simple, low-cost, and easy to implement procedure) allowed the participant to acquire skills at a higher rate, resulting in more skill acquisition in less time.  Future research may examine whether adding modeled prompts when teaching other forms of language (e.g., receptive skills) may result in faster acquisition of vocalizations in the same way that modeled prompts effected conversational language for this participant.