Date of Award:

5-2014

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

Special Education and Rehabilitation

Committee

Thomas Higbee

Abstract

Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often experience difficulty in initiating and maintaining social dialogue in multiple settings. This study examined the effects of training multiple social scripts, used in sequence, on the number of conversational exchanges within a social dialogue in four male participants with ASD. A multiple baseline design was used across participants to determine if there was an increase in the number of conversational exchanges within a social dialogue after training. In training sessions, participants learned the scripted conversations and used them to engage in social dialogue. During training sessions, scripts were completely faded for three of four participants. However, none of the participants demonstrated an increase in the number of conversational exchanges during the generalization condition in naturalistic settings. This failure to increase in the number of conversational exchanges in generalization settings could possibly be attributed to one or more of the following: a lack of a discriminative stimulus to cue the use of the script, too many words in the scripts, lack of training on more simple scripts first, and a lack of adequate time to facilitate generalization.

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