Teaching Children with Autism to Seek Information by Asking Questions

Background:  

Requesting information is useful because it allows an individual to obtain important, unknown information from the environment, which may result in increased social interaction and expansion of overall language. A common problem for children with autism is the lack of asking questions to others. Requesting information is typically emitted as a “wh” question such as who?, what?, when?, or which?  Children with autism often require specific intervention to learn to request information. Studies have demonstrated effective procedures to teach requests for information (Sundberg, Loeb, Hale, & Eigenheer, 2002; Shillingsburg, Valentino, Bowen, & Bradley, 2011).  However, requesting information is still a skill area in which the research with children with autism is limited, especially in relation to the types of questions taught.  Additionally, little is known about subsequent use of the information once given. 

Objectives:  Objectives of the current study include an examination of treatment procedures to teach the request for information “which?” and “who?”. Additionally, this study evaluates if participants use the information requested appropriately and whether these language skills generalize to novel scenarios.

Methods:  Ian, an 11-year-old male, and Josh, a 7-year-old male, both diagnosed with autism participated. A nonconcurrent multiple baseline was employed to assess treatment effects. To teach the requests “which?” and “who?”, scenarios were arranged to contrive a motivation for the needed information.  During “which” scenarios, 10 containers were labeled with numbers or pictures. When the participant asked for a snack, the instructor indicated that the snack was in one of the containers. During “who” scenarios, several therapists were present. When the participant asked for a snack, the instructor indicated that one of the therapists had the snack.  In both scenarios the information regarding which container or which therapist was withheld in order to increase a need for the information.  In order to promote discrimination of when information is needed, these sessions were interspersed with sessions in which the information regarding the location of the snack was already given.  Both “who” and “which” were taught simultaneously using a time delay procedure and a vocal prompt of the correct request. The two requests were alternated to assess correct discrimination of the two request forms and data were also collected on the use of the requested information. Generalization probes were conducted to assess requests for information in novel situations.

Results:  During Baseline, neither participant requested information using “who?” or “which?”. Both participants acquired the ability to request for information during teaching.  Additionally, results showed that both were able to discriminate when information was needed versus when it was already provided, were able to use each request form under the appropriate conditions, and also successfully used the information that was provided in response to the request.  Lastly, generalization probes demonstrated that both participants generalized the request for information “Which?” across four additional novel situations. 

Conclusions:  Procedures in the current study were successful in teaching two children with autism to emit requests for information when the information was desired. Participants were successful in using the two requests appropriately and generalizing to novel situations.