Article #1
Tracey Johnson
EDUC 528
Liberty University

Social initiations are the core deficit for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (Koegel, Koegel, Bradshaw, & Ashbaugh, 2013). To be specific initiated questions during social interactions are often the biggest problem for those with ASD. This study addresses the use of motivational procedures of Pivotal Response Treatment. Pivotal Response Training (PRT) is a naturalistic behavioral intervention developed to “target stimulus and response generalization, increase spontaneity, reduce prompt dependency, and increase motivation while still relying on the principles of applied behavior analysis (Koegel et al. 2013).” This treatment was developed to increase the social question asking in children with autism spectrum disorder (Koegel et al. 2013).” The authors state that question asking is a key component in improving long term outcomes for children with ASD Children with ASD, in comparison to neuro-typically developing children, display significant limitations in both quality and quantity of verbal and non-verbal initiations, initiated question asking are considerable lower and sometimes absent in children with ASD(Koegel et al. 2013), this study further state: that the absences of question asking can span throughout adolescence and adulthood of persons with ASD (Koegel et al. 2013).” “Children with ASD typically use language for requesting objects, requesting actions, and protesting, unlike their peers who are typically developing language learners who exhibit early forms of question-asking within their first group of words. This deficit may be seen in social language interactions and early play interactions and could possibly continue throughout life their life span (Koegel et al. 2013).” Asking “wh” questions is critical in developing milestone language and vocabulary building; failing do so may have a very adverse effect on language development. (Koegel et al. 2013). The participants in this study were 3 years old who met the DSM-IV criteria for ASD. The participants also met the criteria of knowing at least 5o words and had not received ant PRT treatment prior to this study. During this study the participants received no other therapy besides PRT. “The experimental design was a multiple baseline design to assess the intervention on improving question asking using motivational procedures (Koegel et al. 2013).”The baseline probe consisted parent and child playing for ten minutes with age appropriate toys, the parents were not given any instructions other than to interact with the children they way they normally would. The children were given intervention sessions that amounted to 10 hours per week for 10 months. Parent received two hours of parental education per week. The PRT intervention consisted of teaching social questions and used reinforcers as rewards. The questions were in the series of “WH” questions such as “Where is it?” “Who is it?” and “What Happened? “What if?” At the conclusion of the study there was a very strong indication that the participants increased their use of initiated question asking during social situations and during natural play. This article expanded my knowledge on both the topic of communication and play in children with ASD. As with other articles on ASD this was very informative, this further proves that the needs for early interventions strategies are crucial. The authors stressed the importance of the acquisition of the skill of asking questions and the importance of the skill in relation to developing social opportunities outside of the home setting. The study proved that the increase of communication in the participants demonstrated an increase in expressive and receptive language, which could lead to a tremendous improvement in the functional use of language of social gains. The PRT treatment focused