Word Learning in Children with Autism

1. Word Learning in Children with Autism Student: Ashley Vitello Faculty Mentor: Lynne Hewitt, Ph.D

2. What is the Research Project? • Comparison between behavioral intervention and naturalistic intervention in children with autism while learning novel words • Behavioral Intervention • Structured, repetitive presentation with prompts and reinforcers • Naturalistic Intervention • A non-structured, child-centered, presentation in a natural environment • Novel words • Words and objects the child does not have a label for in certain lexical categories and presented in one of the previous intervention styles • Lexical category:Animals, Words:Narwhal, Echidna, Okapi, Grouper, Tapir, and Genet

3. Why Do This Study? • There are many studies that have been done for both naturalistic intervention • Each style comments on their success rates and criticizes the other style • We found no studies that compared the two together • This is important to know if there is a comparable difference on the succession and efficacy between the two intervention styles • If there is then it could alter clinicians and researchers in their practice and further research.

4. How is This Research Conducted? • Each child is a single participant with themselves as their own control • The words are randomly assigned to the intervention styles, then are presented to the child in that style. • Before the child hears the words, he is tested to see if he knows the word both expressively and receptively.

5. How is This Research Conducted? Con’t. • The child’s part is dependent on the intervention style used • The child learns the words in a half hour session with fifteen minutes of each style • The child is post-tested at the end of the study to see if any words were learned and retained both expressively and receptively

6. Was There a Pilot? • Pilot was two and a half year old male • No autism • We had five session instead of the planned ten sessions • This was to see if the lesson plans we made up for each intervention style would work out

7. Findings No words learned expressively. 9 words learned receptively 5 from naturalistic intervention context 4 from behavioral intervention context

8. Implications • Both learning contexts equally for this child • Neither very effective

9. Future Research • Increase number of sessions to ensure enough expressive practice with words • Enroll participants with autism