Effects of pivotal response treatment on reciprocal vocal contingency in a randomized controlled trial of children with autism spectrum disorder.
Jena McDaniel, Paul Yoder, Madison Crandall and 4 others
PMID 32054315WHAT IT FOUND
Children receiving Pivotal Response Treatment plus parent training showed higher vocal reciprocity with adults after 24 weeks compared to controls.
No significant difference was found at baseline or after 12 weeks. This suggests the treatment effect on spontaneous speech interaction emerges with sustained intervention.
Key findings
01After 24 weeks, children in the PRT-P group had significantly higher ranked reciprocal vocal contingency scores than the control group.
02There was no significant difference in vocal reciprocity between groups at baseline or after 12 weeks of intervention.
03The treatment group received weekly parent training and intensive in-home intervention, while the control group continued stable community services.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The identities of the adult communication partners in the audio recordings were unknown, so the analysis could not distinguish between interactions with trained parents versus untrained individuals. The LENA audio recording system has known classification errors for speaker identity and event type, although the authors note these are generally conservative and reduced by large sample sizes. The study only included children with significant expressive language delays and excluded those receiving more than 1 hour per week of individual speech therapy or more than 15 hours per week of one-on-one ABA, limiting generalizability to broader populations. There was a baseline difference in receptive language scores between groups, although the authors argue this did not correlate with the outcome measure.
Declared interests
The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose. The study was supported by NIH and U.S. Government grants.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that PRT produces immediate changes in naturalistic speech interaction. The study found no significant difference in vocal reciprocity after 12 weeks; the benefit only emerged after 24 weeks of sustained intervention.