Increasing Response Diversity to Intraverbals in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Only two children were studied, so this shows what happened for them, not how many children would respond. The children received pre-experimental training on unknown target items and their features, functions, and classes before the main training. Novel responses were few during training and none appeared at follow-up, so the study did not show improved creativity. Generalization to similar untrained questions did not occur, so trained answers may not carry over to new questions. Reinforcement was given during probe trials, so the study cannot rule out that reinforcement alone contributed to some responding. Teachers and parents may have used the prompting strategy during the study, which could have added training outside the experiment. The study did not assess whether the children knew the items or their features for the generalization questions, so poor generalization may partly reflect missing prerequisite skills. Follow-up maintenance was not equal across all questions; Dede's responses to the water-bottle alternate-use question decreased more than his responses to the first two questions. All children came from one inclusive preschool in Beijing and were from middle-class families, so cultural and setting limits apply.

The study was funded by the 2019 Comprehensive Discipline Construction Fund of the Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University. No other conflicts of interest are reported.

Do not conclude that this prompting method improves creative or flexible conversation for children with autism. It increased only trained answers, novel responses were few, and similar untrained questions did not improve.