The Training and Generalization of Social Interaction Skills With Autistic Youth

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to increase the initiations and duration of social interactions between autistic and nonhandicapped youths. Experiment 1 taught two autistic youths to initiate and elaborate social interactions with three age-appropriate and commonly used leisure objects; a radio, a video game, and gum. The students were first taught to use the objects and subsequently instructed in the related social skills. The youths generalized these social responses to other nonhandicapped peers in the same leisure setting. A second experiment trained a third autistic youth to emit similar social leisure skills. The use of the leisure objects and the related social skills were taught at the same time. The autistic youth learned these skills and generalized them to other handicapped peers in the same leisure setting. The importance of teaching generalized social responding in particular subenvironments was emphasized.DESCRIPTORS: social skills, autistic youthsThe term autism denotes a withdrawal from social interaction with other persons. Individuals diagnosed as autistic display an array of behavioral pathologies such as self-injury, overselective attention, and self-stimulation that theoretically are manifestations of the underlying condition of extreme self-directedness. The thrust of past educational and research efforts has been to develop interventions that remediate the behavioral excesses and skill deficits so common among autistic persons. An initial tactic has been to reduce aberrant behavior-like aggression and self-stimulationthrough behavior management procedures (Koegel & Covert, 1972). With deviant behavior under control, interventions have been applied to remediate language deficits (Lovaas, 1977) and to teach a number of skills in the areas of self-care, perceptual development (Schreibman, Koegel, & Craig,

A Pilot Study with a Novel Setup for Collaborative Play of the Humanoid Robot KASPAR with Children with Autism

“…Because children with autism have difficulties with generalizing behaviour and skills between settings [26], we wanted to design the autistic children's interactions with both the robot and the human adult to be as similar as possible in order to ensure the highest likelihood of skill transference between the two settings. To this end, we used a humanoid robot known as KASPAR [14] (see Fig.…”

The Teacch Approach to Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…In addition, teachers may arrange their classrooms in ways that make social activities motivating, which encourages children to initiate social behaviors (McGee, Morrier, & Daly, 1999). Studies have indicated that using teacher-mediated or one-to-one teaching techniques to initiate social interactions prior to practicing them with peers increases the frequency and duration of interactions (GaylordRoss & Haring, 1987;Gaylord-Ross, Haring, Breen, & Pitts-Conway, 1984). reviewed several behavioral strategies used with individual children to increase their social interactive skills.…”

Teaching Social Language to Moderately Handicapped Students

“…Unfortunately, although the training of syntactically correct initiations has been demonstrated, there are few examples of studies showing turn-taking or communicative exchanges beyond one or two utterances (Gaylord-Ross, Haring, Breen, & PittsConway, 1984). In our research, we taught such skills to students who had difficulty in initiating and maintaining conversational exchanges.…”