In regard to intervention strategies, Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) has been shown to lead to collateral improvements in outside settings and in other core areas of autism ( Koegel & Koegel, 2006). However, current research has not assessed whether gains in question-asking in preschool children with ASD result in additional gains in initiations of other forms of untargeted questions that are not directly taught during the intervention. Given the importance of question-asking in child play and adolescent and adult conversation ( Koegel, Ashbaugh, Detar, Register, & Koegel, in press), identifying an intervention that produces flexible, generalized skills with lasting effects may have a significant impact for children with ASD. Additional research extends these findings by demonstrating that interventions for question-asking, if implemented with motivational strategies, may result in generalization of targeted questions to novel settings, which can result in increased social opportunities outside of the clinical setting ( Koegel et al., 2010). For example, Koegel & Koegel (1995) reported that teaching question-asking to children with autism resulted in acquisition of prepositions, pronouns and attention-seeking utterances. Interventions targeting question-asking for children with autism have been shown to be especially useful for increasing language skills and improving social interactions. Therefore, initiations and question-asking has been discussed as an important intervention variable ( Harper et al., 2008 Koegel et al., 1998 Koegel & Koegel, 1995 Mundy & Crowson, 1997 Mundy & Sigman, 1989 Mundy, Sigman, & Kasari, 1990 Paul, 2008 Warren, Baxter, Anderson, Marshall, & Baer, 1981). This pervasive problem of a lack of question-asking may severely limit verbal learning opportunities and present as pragmatically inappropriate during social interactions ( Peck, 1985 Volkmar, Lord, Bailey, Schultz, & Klin, 2004). Carr et al., 1994 Frea, 1995 Harper et al., 2008 Koegel, Ashbaugh, Detar, Register, & Koegel, in press Koegel, Camarata, Valdez-Menchaca, & Koegel, 1998 Koegel & Koegel, 1995).Īdditionally, as asking wh- questions is a developmental milestone that sets the groundwork for language learning and vocabulary acquisition (Koegel, Camarata, Valdez-Menchaca, & Koegel, 1998), failing to initiate questions in the preschool years could have an especially profound impact on language development. This deficit may be evident in early play and social language interactions ( Harper, Symon, & Frea, 2008 Koegel et al., 2010 Koegel, Koegel, Frea, & Fredeen, 2001 Oke & Schreibman, 1990) and may continue throughout life, as adolescents and adults with autism often initiate a limited number of questions during social interactions (c.f. Children with autism used language almost exclusively for requesting objects, requesting actions, and protesting, unlike typical language learners who exhibit early forms of question-asking within their first group of words. That is, independent of a child with ASD’s cognitive and communicative level, the number of initiated questions and question forms appear to be limited ( Koegel, Koegel, Shoshan, & McNerney, 1999). In particular, initiated questions are persistently and pervasively absent in individuals with ASD throughout the life span ( Koegel & Koegel, 2012). However, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), in contrast to typically developing children, experience significant limitations in both quality and quantity of verbal and non-verbal initiations ( Mundy, Sigman, Ungerer, & Sherman, 1986 Newman, 2005 Stone, Ousley, Yoder, Hogan, & Hepburn, 1997 Warreyn, Roeyers, Van Wetswinkel, & De Groote, 2007 Wetherby & Prutting, 1984). Social initiations, such as question-asking, have been suggested as a key variable in improving long term outcomes in children with autism ( Koegel, Koegel, Green-Hopkins, & Barnes, 2010).
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