Modeling Training of Child’s Echoic Conversational Response for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder: To Be a Good Listener

Abstract

Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulties in responding to conversation with verbal language. These students often repeat what they hear, and their echoic behavior has a potentially communicative function. We define the echoic behavior when an individual repeats a peer's topic word with appropriate prosody within 3 s as the child's echoic conversational response. In this study, we examined the acquisition of the child's echoic conversational response skills and whether these skills could provide and generalize natural conversation for 4 students with ASD. During the training, students were instructed to imitate the topic word that the experimenter had used in the latest conversation. Students learned the child's echoic conversational response skills and improved their conversation skills. They even showed a slight generalization for nontraining materials through trainings and improvements in responding with new verbal responses. These findings suggested that expanding speakers' repertoires for students with ASD might facilitate improvement of natural conversation skills.