Honors Theses

Date of Award

Spring 5-13-2023

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Department

Communication Sciences and Disorders

First Advisor

Toshikazu Ikuta

Second Advisor

Ying Hao

Third Advisor

Denise Soares

Relational Format

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

This study closely examined the progression and fidelity of strategy implementation of parents undergoing an ASD language intervention training program. This instructional, interactive program was designed for parents of children with autism, thus catering to the needs of participants involved. This study assessed the use of parent comments and redirects, two kinds of parent strategies, during each parent-child interaction to provide more information about the impact of training sessions. The researchers hypothesized that by the end of training, parent participants would increase their fidelity of strategy implementation, increase their use of comments rather than redirects, and employ more open-ended questions than closed-ended questions.

The two parent-child dyads participating in this study attended pretest meetings followed by the intervention stage, during which the primary researcher provided strategies to help parents elicit language from their child. The follow-up phase took place one week later in order to promote maintenance of learned strategies. A ten-minute parent-child play sample was recorded during each meeting, each of which were scored based on strategy implementation and analyzed by the researchers with a behavior coding software. All meetings were held via Zoom and coded via a behavior analyzing software, Mangold Interact.

Parents from both participating dyads improved their strategy implementation frequency and increased their usage of comments and open-ended questions throughout the course of the program, as hypothesized. Overall, this study successfully allowed for a more effective examination of the parents’ actions within child play, and allowed researchers to assist parents in the way they interact with their child.

Accessibility Status

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Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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