Tutor Language Use During Interactive Book Reading Sessions

Abstract

Understanding how children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) improve oral language skills in relationship to tutor prompting has not yet been investigated. The study examined how variation in language prompt use by tutors during a storybook reading intervention influences growth in vocabulary and emergent literacy for young children with ASD. Participants included 9 tutors and 41 preschoolers with ASD enrolled in an interactive book reading intervention as part of a larger randomized control trial. These data were used to evaluate research questions focused on how variation in tutors’ use of language prompts during interactive book reading relates to language and vocabulary growth for preschool children with ASD. Results indicate that tutor prompting fit a two-factor model, contextualized and decontextualized language. Furthermore that controlling for pretest, Completion prompts, a type of contextualized language prompting was uniquely predictive of child gains in phonological awareness from pre to immediately after intervention.