| One way that typically developing children learn about objects and events in their environment is by initiating social interactions (Halliday, 1975; Nelson, 1974). This process, however, is not generally seen with children with autism. A striking characteristic that is often found among children with autism is the failure to initiate social interaction with others (Schreibman, 1988). Thus, in most cases, children with autism learn only when others make the initiative to approach and teach them something new. This study taught four children with autism to initiate a question and assessed whether they could learn new information from asking the question. This study extended the work of Taylor and Harris (1995) and Koegel et al. (1998) and further investigated the extent to which children with autism could be taught to initiate a question. An alternating-treatments design was used to compare two techniques for teaching vocabulary. The first technique consisted of a passive condition where children were directly taught labels of common household objects (e.g., "This is a spoon."). The second technique consisted of an active condition where children were allowed to choose common objects in their environment and were taught to ask for the label of the object, "What's that?" It was hypothesized that the children would learn the labels faster in the active condition than in the passive condition. Furthermore, once children initiated a question and learned in the training setting, it was hypothesized that they would generalize the skill of question-asking to other settings and become less dependent on others to initiate their acquisition of language. Results from this study showed that all four children learned to ask a question, and more importantly, learned new vocabulary from the information they received after asking the question. For three of the four children, learning in the active condition led to a faster rate of acquisition of new labels than learning in the passive condition. Also, after training was completed, joint attention, eye contact and spontaneous question-asking during generalization probes increased for all children. |
