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Behavioral Interventions to Treat Speech Sound Disorders in Children With Autism

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Abstract

Children with autism are at a higher risk of being affected by speech disorders and often require remedial intervention. Eikeseth and Nesset (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 36(3), 325–337, 2003) used sufficient-response exemplar training of vocal imitation in conjunction with prompting, chaining, and shaping procedures to successfully teach 2 typically developing children to articulate several Norwegian words with blends. The present study extends and adapts these procedures to children with autism. Participants were TA, an 11-year-old boy, and KS, a 15-year-old girl, both with autism and speech sound disorders. For each participant, 3 sets of 10 words with specific blends in the initial position were targeted for training. Vocal imitation training with within-stimulus prompts was used for both participants. For KS, lip-tongue-teeth position prompts and chaining were added during the training of certain words. A multiple-baseline across-behaviors (word sets with target blends) design demonstrated improvement in the articulation of trained words and generalization of correct articulation to untrained words with both participants. The findings suggest that speech sound disorders in children with autism can be addressed with behavioral interventions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Maurice Feldman for his valuable suggestions on an earlier draft of the manuscript; Dr. Vani Rupella, Speech-Language Pathologist, PhD, for explaining one of the participant’s speech assessments; parents of the participants for their consent to share the findings; and Ms. Madhavi Rao, Ms. Stella, and other therapists for their help with conducting this study. The contents of this paper are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent official views of the organization they are affiliated with.

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The study has not received any funding from any authority.

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  1. Behavior Momentum India, 407, 7th Main, 80 ft. Road, HRBR Layout, Bangalore, 560043, India

    Sridhar Aravamudhan & Smita Awasthi

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  1. Sridhar Aravamudhan
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  2. Smita Awasthi
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Correspondence to Smita Awasthi.

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All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Aravamudhan, S., Awasthi, S. Behavioral Interventions to Treat Speech Sound Disorders in Children With Autism. Behav Analysis Practice 13, 174–185 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-019-00362-5

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