Effects of Video modeling for teaching conversational skills to children with autism: a multiple case study.

Abstract

Children with autism often show deficits in conversational skills. In 1989, Charlop and Milstein came to the conclusion that Video modeling helped three autistic children to improve their conversational skills. Their procedure has then been used several times in other American studies. In the present multiple cases study, we are looking to assess the effects of an adapted intervention that uses Video Modeling. Our intervention was adapted to the care setting of a French establishment which deals with autistic patients. During that intervention, three children with autism, between 6 and 10 years old, had to watch a videotape of an adult and a child talking about their favorite games. Following that, they had to practice with the therapist, respecting the same discussion script. Before and after the intervention, we assessed their conversational skills in different conversation tasks. The objective was to measure their conversational skills acquisition, their ability to generalize to an untrained topic, to another person, to an untrained script, and the maintenance of treatment gains after a 6-weeks period without intervention. Both statistical and qualitative analysis have been carried out. Qualitative analysis suggests that two children were able to learn conversational skills through Video Modeling, to generalize their new skills to an untrained topic and to another person, and to maintain their gains over a 6- weeks period. Statistical analysis confirms those results only for one child and shows no generalization to an untrained script. These results seem to suggest that an adapted use of Video modeling could be helpful to enhance conversational skills for some autistic children. However, these first results should be taken with caution. Before using this intervention in a speech therapy setting, it seems necessary to replicate this study on a larger scale, and to make some adaptations.