The development of generative social comprehension in children with autism

Abstract

Social comprehension refers to the ability to understand social concepts which entail the interactions between two or more individuals. The present study utilized commercially-available children's books to evaluate the effectiveness of a social comprehension training procedure that utilized multiple exemplars to develop generative social comprehension in children with autism. A multiple probe design across five common childhood social concepts (e.g., sharing) was employed for each of the three children who participated in this study. Probes were conducted on the first presentation of novel books and the proportion of correct responses to the questions was measured. Training on each social concept continued until a generative mastery criterion was met in which the child responded correctly to at least 14 out of 16 questions on three consecutive novel books. The results showed that all of the children were able to answer an increasing proportion of the questions correctly on novel books. However, only 2 of the 3 children were able to meet the generative mastery criterion on 4 out of the 5 social concepts. Generalization probes across untrained in-vivo social scenarios were also assessed. Here, all of the children responded to a high percentage of questions following social comprehension training.