The purpose of the present study was to investigate the unconditional and conditional relations between amount of intervention and language development in children with autism. Joint attention skills were proposed as child characteristics that might moderate this relation. The results replicated previous findings that better joint attention skills were associated with greater language development. The results further indicated that the relation between amount of intervention and gain in language age was conditional; it depended upon the child's ability to respond to bids for joint attention from others and initial language skills. The current study demonstrated the utility of employing characteristics of children as moderators of relations between interventions and developmental outcomes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.