An Experimental And Inventional Study Of Spontaneous Communication Behaviors In The Preschool Children With Autism

The autistic children are considered to be lack of spontaneous communication behaviors which will seriously influence the development of communication and socialization. To explore the features and strategies of spontaneous communication behaviors for the preschool children with autism , this article will use the method of experiments and interventions to research the spontaneous communication behaviors. The whole research has the following two parts.The first part: to use the method of experiments to do comparative study for three preschool children with autism and three preschool children with developmental delay. The author designed four experiments about communication functions from the different communication function. they are experiment of spontaneous request behaviors, experiment of spontaneous request for assistance behaviors, experiment of spontaneous refuse or protest behaviors, experiment of spontaneous greeting or saying goodbye behaviors, and use the way of microscopic analysis to analysis the difference of two groups' spontaneous verbal communication behaviors, spontaneous attention behaviors , non-verbal spontaneous communication behaviors .the results showed that: (1) all the four experiments showed that : there is a significance difference between the preschool children with autism and preschool children with developmental delay in the filed of spontaneous communication, the autistic children are lack of spontaneous communication behaviors and the frequency are also lower than the developmental delay children; (2) all the four experiments noted that no matter under what communication function , the autistic children have a little eye contact behaviors and have no gaze switch behaviors; (3) all the four experiments proved that there is no obvious difference between the autistic children and the developmental delay children regarding non-verbal communication gestures such as hugging,leading the adults' hands ,although the autistic children have some touch-pointing behaviors , the distal pointing haven't appeared all the time , the autistic children rarely use the combination of gestures and eye contact to communicate and the high gesture strategies are also insufficient.The second part : to use the single-subject design to do intervention research for the autistic children who involved in the experiments. The author use the ecological assessment and function analysis to investigate the communicative needs of the autistic children and adopt the milieu teaching to do communication training to discuss the influence of spontaneous communication behaviors and communication function. The results showed that: (1) the three autistic children's non-verbal spontaneous communication behaviors increased in the Intervention period and the maintenance period and the pointing behaviors were also increased ; (2) the three autistic children's spontaneous verbal communication behaviors increased in the Intervention period and the maintenance period; (3) the three autistic children's communication content increased; (4) the three autistic children's communication function expanded , the behaviors of request,refuse or protest,comment,seeking information emerged ,but the seeking information and attracting attention for share still insufficient.The conclusions from the above studies are: (1) the frequency of the autistic children's spontaneous communication behaviors is low (2) the autistic children have limited spontaneous communication functions (3) the autistic children's eye contact are sufficient and the gaze switch haven't appeared ; (4) the autistic children are lack of pointing regarding non-verbal spontaneous communication gestures and have limited high gesture strategies, but the pointing behaviors were increased after intervention; (5) the milieu teaching method is effective for the spontaneous communication behaviors for the autistic children; (6) comment,seeking information improved difficultly (7) there exist relationship between non-verbal communication behaviors and communication functions (8) the spontaneous communication behaviors are contributed to the development of language.The research give some suggestions for intervention: (1) taking notice of the interesting and pivotal of autistic children; (2) Strengthening the cognition and comprehension of language training (3) paying more attention to the environment and arrangement; (4) training in natural environment (5) stressing the functional learning tasks (6) using the milieu teaching systematic(7) expanding the communication environment and communication partner.