Young Children With ASD: Parent Strategies for Interaction During Adapted Book Reading Activity

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify how parents’ use of language and literacy strategies during an adapted shared book reading activity relate to social, behavioral, and cognitive skills for their children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Participants were 111 young children (ages 4–7 years) with ASD and their mothers. A factor analysis of the items used in the coding system, yielded a four-factor model of parent-led behaviors during the shared book reading activity: clarification, feedback, teaching, and evocative techniques. In regression analyses, the frequency of parents’ use of clarification, feedback, and evocative strategies used during the shared reading task were related to certain demographic and child factors. Results have implications for the types of structure and support that parents might provide their young children with ASD during informal reading sessions.

Looking or talking: Visual attention and verbal engagement during shared book reading of preschool children on the autism spectrum

“…Our findings expand upon previous work (e.g. Fleury & Hugh, 2018;Tipton et al, 2017) by providing insight into what engagement during SBR looks like more broadly for preschoolers on the spectrum and elucidating important relationships between differential aspects of children's visual attention and verbal engagement and parent behaviors. Significant relationships found between the length of time spent reading and various child and parent behaviors were expected; longer reading duration naturally affords children greater opportunities to visually attend and verbally engage and parents to utilize SBR behaviors in attempts to engage their child.…”

“…As predicted, children produced the most utterances in response to parent questions/prompts (71% of total verbal engagement). Questions and prompts during SBR are a known turn-taking tool used by parents to elicit and increase child participation and responsiveness for both children with language disorder (McGinty et al, 2012) and children on the spectrum (Fleury & Schwartz, 2017; Tipton et al, 2017). As such, this result was somewhat expected, but the high correlation found may indicate that children on the spectrum rely more on this behavior by their parent than other children to maintain attention and facilitate active participation.…”

“…Promisingly, this may further indicate that parents of children on the spectrum are potentially adept at prompting and maintaining their child's attention. As such, these parents may have adapted to their child's social communication and attentional challenges by actively prompting and maintaining interaction in ways that are tailored to their child's needs as shown in previous research (Tipton et al, 2017;Watson, 1998). Moreover, due to known attentional differences (Chita-Tegmark, 2016), children on the spectrum may rely more on their parents to facilitate and maintain interaction during SBR than other children; however, causal assumptions cannot be made due to the cross-sectional design of this study.…”

“…Asking questions related to story content and utterances that prompt attention have been shown to be important behaviors used by parents for facilitating joint attention and turn-taking behaviors and increasing verbal engagement and responsiveness during SBR for TD children (Ezell & Justice, 1998; Son & Tineo, 2016). Recent research indicates that parents of children on the spectrum also use a range of SBR behaviors, including questions and prompts, to facilitate joint interaction and enhance learning opportunities (Tipton et al, 2017). However, children on the spectrum may be less inclined to respond to these behaviors given characteristic social impairments, including impairments or the absence of joint attention observed in early childhood (Mundy et al, 1990).…”

“…We focused on parent SBR behaviors shown to facilitate engagement during SBR in previous SBR intervention research (e.g. Fleury & Schwartz, 2017; Mucchetti, 2013; Tipton et al, 2017). Furthermore, receptive vocabulary and alphabet knowledge were chosen as measures of emergent literacy given that these are important predictors of later reading ability for TD children (National Early Literacy Panel (NELP), 2008) and children on the spectrum (Westerveld et al, 2018) and are linked to visual attention during SBR for TD children (e.g.…”