Helping Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Develop Social Ability: The Early Start Denver Model Approach

Abstract

The Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) incorporates both a set of teaching procedures and a defined teaching content representing empirical knowledge derived from decades of research in developmental psychology (i.e., cognitive, social, emotional, linguistic, and communicative development) and learning science. Integrating research involving both typical learning and developmental and atypical developmental and learning patterns seen in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the ESDM brings together the principles used by applied behavior analysis, allied health professions, and early childhood intervention into a comprehensive intervention for young children with ASD and their families. A variety of controlled and single subject design studies has demonstrated that some of its strongest effects occur in the social-communicative domain. How ESDM conceptualizes social-communicative development in ASD from empirical research, and how it translates those concepts into a manualized intervention that improves children's social communication, is the topic of this chapter. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)