Word Learning in Children with Autism. Student: Ashle

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 categoryAnimals, WordsNarwhal, 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.

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How is This Research Conducted? Cont.

• The childs 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

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Implications

• Both learning contexts equally for this child
• Neither very effective

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Future Research

• Increase number of sessions to ensure enough
  expressive practice with words
• Enroll participants with autism