Intervention Study Of PII-based Reciprocal Imitation Training On The Imitation Ability Of Children With Autism

Imitation skills play a vital role in children’s social cognitive development and are a prerequisite for learning many other areas,and children with autism have obvious imitation deficits compared to the average child.Imitation interventions for children with autism can not only improve their imitation skills,but also help to acquire other skills that are not directly taught,including language,play skills,and shared attention.Studies have shown that Reciprocal Imitation Training can improve the imitation ability of autistic children,but there are few relevant empirical studies in China,In addition,multiple intervention methods implemented by parents have better effects,but whether the effect of interactive imitation training based on parent executed intervention is better is still uncertain.so this study will explore it in depth.This study is divided into three main parts: Study 1 uses behavioral skills training to teach the Reciprocal Imitation skills of parents of autistic children A and B,and the results show that the Reciprocal Imitation skills of two parents are improved.Study 2 used a cross-behavior multi-baseline experimental design,taking the Reciprocal Imitation Training performed by parents as the independent variables and the object imitation and gesture imitation as the dependent variables,and the results showed that the object imitation and gesture imitation of autistic children A and B were improved.Study 3 adopted a cross-behavioral multi-baseline experimental design,taking the Reciprocal Imitation Training performed by the researchers as the independent variables,and taking the object imitation and gesture imitation as the dependent variables,and the results showed that the object imitation and gesture imitation of autistic children C and D were improved.We also assessed whether there was a difference between the effects of interventions administered by parents and those performed by investigators.The conclusions of the study are as follows:(1)Behavioral skills training can significantly improve parents’ Reciprocal Imitation skills.(2)The Reciprocal Imitation Training performed by parents has a good intervention and maintenance effect on the ability of autistic children to object imitation and gesture imitation.(3)The Reciprocal Imitation Training performed by the researchers had a good intervention and maintenance effect on the ability of autistic children to object imitation and gesture imitation.(4)There was no significant difference between the effects of the intervention performed by parents and those performed by the investigators.