Teaching pronouns to individuals with autism

The team worked with one child with autism. They used short, clear teaching trials. First the child learned to point to the right person when hearing "you," "me," or "I." Next the child learned to say those same words when asked.

They tracked three pronoun sets across days. The design was a multiple baseline across behaviors. This means they started teaching each pronoun set at a different time.

The child began using pronouns correctly as both listener and speaker. The skill spread to new teachers, rooms, and pictures without extra teaching. The gains stayed high after the lessons ended.

Shield et al. (2015) saw a very different result. Native-signing children with autism still avoided clear sign pronouns. The clash is simple: spoken pronouns can be taught, but sign pronouns stay hard even when they look obvious. The difference lies in the language mode, not the kids.

Early et al. (2012) and Cicchetti et al. (2014) used the same listener-then-speaker path. Their work shows this order can spark new talking skills. The pronoun study copies that flow and gets the same boost.

Skrimpa et al. (2022) add a new layer. Bilingual autistic kids did slightly better on pronoun tasks. So teaching in one clear language first, then adding another, is safe and may even help.

You can copy the listener-first, speaker-second script tomorrow. Run a few listener trials today. When the child points to the right person every time, flip to speaker trials and ask, "Who has the ball?" Track generalization by switching seats, staff, and toys. One clear path beats hoping pronouns will just appear.

Individuals with autism often struggle with pronouns because the correct term shifts with the speaker's perspective. The same object is mine to one person and yours to another, so pronoun use is a conditional, deictic discrimination rather than a fixed label.

In verbal-behavior terms, pronouns must be taught as both tacts and intraverbals under speaker and listener roles, not memorized as static answers. This study systematically evaluated a teaching procedure, which prior published work had rarely done.

Using a multiple-probe design across pronoun pairs, one participant with autism was taught four pairs: mine/yours, I/you, me/you, and my/your. Each pair was trained in both listener and speaker roles.

The participant learned to discriminate the pronoun pairs correctly, and generalization was obtained across novel instructors, places, and stimuli. For practitioners, this supports teaching pronoun pairs explicitly across both roles and programming for generalization rather than training in a single context.