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NIH Grant:

Child-Initiated Interactions and Autism Intervention

 

This grant from the National Institutes of Health (PI Robert Koegel, collaborative with Lynn Koegel and Connie Kasari) will assess the effectiveness of communicative initiations in the intervention for children with autism. 

The literature and our clinical research suggest that improvements in communicative initiations are associated with widespread gains in communication competence, such as seeking and gaining information from the surrounding environment and engaging socially with others.  Further, improvements in these communicative functions appear to result in widespread improvements in the core symptoms of autism (communicative, social, and behavioral domains), as well as in generalized improvements in the condition of autism as a whole. 

This study is designed to investigate the effectiveness of intervention focused on communicative initiations and responsiveness in young children with autism.  Both forms of intervention procedures will be consistent with Pivotal Response Treatment, using a manualized language intervention with motivational procedures of child choice and direct response-reinforcer relationships.  We believe that examining specific intervention components during language intervention and social communication will allow us to assess improvements on the condition of autism.