Increasing “Object-Substitution” Symbolic Play in Young Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may not develop symbolic play skills, so such skills need to be taught specifically. We report an experiment regarding a procedure targeting "object-substitution" symbolic play skills. The "object-substitution" symbolic play behavior occurred when the child labeled a common object with the name of a substitute and used the object to perform a play action (e.g., As she put a bowl on her head, she called it a hat). A multiple probe across behaviors design was employed with five children (four boys and one girl, aged 3 to 6 years) with ASD. All children had verbal communication and demonstrated functional play and generalized imitation, but no symbolic play skills prior to the study. The instruction consisted of intraverbal training, picture prompts, and modeling of play actions. All children demonstrated object-substitution symbolic play skills after the instruction. The occurrences of response generalization were also discussed.

Arranging play activities with missing items to increase object-substitution symbolic play in children with autism spectrum disorder

“…It has been field tested in Chinese-speaking children in Taiwan with an average inter-score agreement of 92% (90-100%) and content validity verified by two experts in developmental psychology. The specific procedure for assessing functional and object-substitution symbolic play is described in Lee et al [10]. All three children scored a 2 (the maximum score) on function play, indicating that they had functional play skills.…”

“…Previous research has incorporated picture prompts into intraverbal training to facilitate creative play actions associated with new names given to an ordinary item [10]. However, the training procedure requires the child to verbalize new names to an item and thus is limited to children who have relatively strong verbal expressions in their repertoire.…”

“…Lee et al [10] attempted to analyze the behavioral processes in object-substitution symbolic play based on children's acquisition of naming suggested by Horne and Lowe [11] and developed a training procedure to increase object-substitution symbolic play. For example, in a caregiver-child interaction during bath time, the caregiver takes a bowl and says, "This is a boat."…”

“…Based on the new name given to the bowl (bowl ¼ boat), the child moves the bowl on water in the bathtub (The play action of a boat is applied to a bowl). Using this paradigm, Lee et al's [10] procedure involved presenting a common object, asking the child what else this object could possibly be (e.g., "What can you pretend with this? "), and requiring the child to perform the substitute's play action using the common object.…”

Increasing Response Diversity to Intraverbals in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…More recent research indicates that the lag schedules of reinforcement, which reinforce a different response from a certain number of previous ones, improved response variability to social questions for children with ASD (Lee et al 2002;Susa and Schlinger 2012). An intraverbal training procedure has been used to increase creative play of common items in young children with ASD (Lee et al 2019). Specifically, the children were taught to provide multiple intraverbal responses and demonstrate creative play actions using a common item (e.g., Presenting a bowl and asking, "What can you pretend with a bowl?").…”