Advanced VB About Experiences

Developing Advanced Verbal Behavior In Children With Autism Necessary For Describing Experiences And Developing Friendships

This workshop is designed to help parents, educators and other professionals learn how to teach a child to have conversations about their experiences with peers and adults. 

Children with a diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), have significant delays in communication and social interaction.  Consequently, their parents often feel frustrated and disappointed by their inability to participate in daily interactions that most families take for granted, such as storytelling, laughing together, discussing the day's events, and speaking with their child about his or her thoughts and feelings.

To develop these interaction skills, it is usually necessary to teach a variety of specific advanced language skills that are often not adequately addressed in many intervention programs. Some of these skills include being able to describe and answer questions about events as they are happening (i.e., What are we doing? Who is here? Where are we?). Another important set of skills is to be able to ask peers and family members for information (e.g., "Where is the playground? When can we go to the playground? Who will take me there? ).  Additionally, the child also must be taught to remember and describe what they are told about their peers (e.g., "What is Joe's favorite video?"), and describe recent past events, (e.g., "Who sat next to you at lunch today?  What did he bring for lunch?"). 

Intervention programs that develop these types of skills can improve a child's ability to establish and maintain meaningful friendships.  Specific strategies will be presented that parents and educators can use to develop these advanced language skills and that focus teaching the child to attend to the actions and interests of peers and family members.

Objectives

1. Participants will be able to identify deficiencies in a learner's receptive language skills that interfere with the child's ability to engage in conversations with peers and family members.
2. Participants will be able to identify deficiencies in a learner's manding, tacting, and intraverbal skills that interfere with the child's ability to engage in conversations with peers and family members.
3. Participants will be able to state three strategies to help children with autism attend to the activities and interests of their peers such that they can engage in conversation about their peers.
4. Participants will be able to state three strategies to help children with autism attend to the activities and interests of their peers such that they can engage in conversation about their peers.
5. Participants will be able to describe a variety of advanced manding skills that are necessary for a child to be able to engage in conversations with others.
6. Participants will be able to identify the difference in methods used to develop a child's ability to engage in intraverbal behavior that involves transitory environmental stimuli and events versus constant verbal stimuli.
7. Participants will be able to describe the developmental seqence of intraverbal skills.
8. Participants will be able to describe methods to teach children with autism to attend to nonvocal verbal stimli that are important to social interactions.