Parent-Implemented Social-Pragmatic Communication Intervention for Young Children with Developmental Disabilities

Co-Principal Investigators: Meadan, Hedda; Stoner, Julia

The purpose of this project is to develop and document the feasibility of an intervention to improve the social-pragmatic communication skills of young children with developmental delays. Social-pragmatic communication skills involve the ability to interpret and send appropriate verbal and nonverbal messages (e.g., eye contact, facial expressions, and body language) for successful communication exchanges in social environments. This intervention will be naturalistic, using the social context of naturally occurring interactions within everyday family activities. Because individuals with developmental delays often exhibit difficulty with generalization, strategies that promote skill generalization to untrained settings, people, and conditions (e.g., beyond the home) will be targeted.

Throughout the project period, researchers will interview and survey both parent participants and project consultants about the feasibility, appropriateness, and importance of the intervention strategies. Performance data on both parents' and children's behavior will be collected throughout the project to evaluate the feasibility and outcomes of the social-pragmatic skills intervention program. Researchers will also assess generalization and maintenance of the behaviors for parents and children.

Parents will also be trained in five visual strategies that may provide cues to prompt or remind children to engage in a behavior or prepare them for an activity. These strategies include: (1) Visual schedules, such as those used to represent the order of activities during an afternoon; (2) Visuals to structure the environment, such as those that represent the place of a specific item or the task to be completed in a specific location; (3) Visual scripts, for example, scripts a child may use to calm down or ask for help; (4) Rule reminder cards, which represent rules such as putting a book back on a shelf after reading it; and (5) Visual task analysis, which involves the use of visuals that demonstrate each step of a procedure (e.g., hand washing).

Researchers will first assess parents' use of these naturalistic and visual strategies. In collaboration with parents, social-communication objectives appropriate for their children's home routines (e.g., meal time, free play) will be identified. The intervention and related materials will be individualized to meet the needs of each participating family. Parents will receive training only on those strategies for which they did not reach the mastery performance criterion in the baseline assessment.

All data collected within the multiple probe design will be analyzed using visual inspection of the graphed data. Mean, trend, magnitude, latency, and stability will be considered when analyzing change in adjacent phases as well as across all phases.

Time series analyses and effect size calculations will be conducted to compare the data from each phase of the project for each individual participant as well as the group of participants to identify changes in behavior over the course of the intervention.