Case Study Of Intervention On Verbal Communication Behavior Of Children With Autism Using Script Intervention

Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder. Children with autism have defects in social communication and social interaction, and they have abnormal interests and behavior. One of the most obvious characters of children with autism is the qualitative imparement in verbal and nonverbal communication. The defect in verbal communication brings lots of adverse effects to children with autism. Improving verbal behavior is meaningful to children with autism.Script intervention is an effective intervention method for verbal behavior of children with autism. In script intervention, script can be presented in forms of words, pictures,audio or video to replace traditional prompt from adult to help children with autism communicate verbally. During the intervention, word cards are usually used to make use of the strength of reading skills of children with autism.This research use multiple baseline design of experiment across settings. Two children with autism were chosen to intervene,and two settings with different structural levels were chosen to compare the intervention effect of different structural settings.Generalization tests were set to find out if there is any transfer effect.The results show that:(l) Script intervention can effectively improve the verbal behavior of children with autism, and help them converse with intervenor.(2)Verbal behavior in settings with different structural levels can both generalize to probe setting, and it shows that script intervention has some transfer effect.(3)Script intervention has effect on the meaningless language which because of the misunderstanding of social use of language, but it has no effect on the meaningless language which functions as self-stimulation.(4) Effects are better and more stable in low structural setting, and the effects of low structural setting are easier to transfer in that setting.