Teaching foundational perspective-taking skills to children with autism using the PEAK-T curriculum: single-reversal “I-You” deictic frames
Quick PEAK-T I-You drills teach children with autism to swap pronouns and the skill carries over to new people and toys.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Belisle et al. (2016) tested PEAK-T’s I-You deictic frames with three children with autism.
They taught kids to switch “I” and “you” in simple sentences like “I have the red car.”
The team used a single-case design and checked if the skill spread to new toys and people.
What they found
All three children learned the I-You swaps quickly.
Two kids also passed brand-new I-You questions without extra teaching.
Skills moved to new items and new adults, showing real transfer.
How this fits with other research
Peters et al. (2018) warn that isolated perspective drills rarely help real social life. They reviewed many studies and say you must embed the skill in live social routines.
Belisle et al. (2020) later used PEAK-DT to teach kids to label others’ feelings from cues like a bandage. Both PEAK studies show the curriculum keeps working for different perspective skills.
St. Clair et al. (2023) took the idea further. They taught children to judge what others know based on what they saw, using rules and many examples. Their package mirrors PEAK-T’s steps and also generalized.
Why it matters
You can add PEAK-T I-You drills to your session tomorrow. Run five quick trials with different items, then jump straight into a social game that needs turn-taking language. This combo answers Peters’ critique by linking the frame to real play. Keep exemplars varied and reinforce fast; the child is likely to use the right pronouns with new partners and toys without extra teaching.
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Join Free →Run 10 I-You trials with two novel toys, then play a turn-taking game and reinforce correct pronouns on each swap.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
We taught basic perspective-taking tasks to 3 children with autism and evaluated their ability to derive mutually entailed single-reversal deictic relations of those newly established perspective-taking skills. Furthermore, we examined the possibility of transfers of perspective-taking function to novel untrained stimuli. The methods were taken from the PEAK-T training curriculum, and results yielded positive gains for all 3 children to learn basic perspective taking as well as for 2 of the 3 to derive untrained single-reversal I relations following direct training of single-reversal You relations. All participants demonstrated a transfer of stimulus function to untrained stimuli after the single-reversal deictic relations had been mastered.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2016 · doi:10.1002/jaba.324