Behavioral Interventions to Treat Speech Sound Disorders in Children With Autism
Prompting mouth shapes and chaining steps can teach blend sounds to children with autism and the skill spreads to new words.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Two school-age children with autism could not say blend sounds like /sp/ or /st/.
The team used vocal imitation, lip-tongue-teeth prompts, and chaining.
They tracked each blend across words in a multiple-baseline design.
What they found
Both kids learned to say the trained blends correctly.
They also said new words with the same blends without extra teaching.
How this fits with other research
Aravamudhan et al. (2021) later added precision-teaching frequency building and got even faster, fluent speech with a young learners.
That study extends this one: same prompting core, but adds timed practice for teens.
Wichnick-Gillis et al. (2019) used a similar prompt-fade plan for social scripts and saw home generalization, showing the method travels across skills.
Tincani et al. (2020) warn that most AAC studies ignore topography-based speech; this paper fills that gap by targeting mouth movements instead of device use.
Why it matters
If a child with autism omits blends, start with vocal imitation plus mouth cues and chain the full word.
Once the sound is stable, add timed drills or precision teaching to build speed, especially for older clients.
The same prompt-fade logic works for social or safety skills, so you can stack goals without learning a new protocol.
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Join Free →Pick one blend the child misses, show the lip-tongue-teeth prompt, have the child imitate, then chain the full word in five trials.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children with autism are at a higher risk of being affected by speech disorders and often require remedial intervention. Eikeseth and Nesset (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 36(3), 325–337, 2003) used sufficient-response exemplar training of vocal imitation in conjunction with prompting, chaining, and shaping procedures to successfully teach 2 typically developing children to articulate several Norwegian words with blends. The present study extends and adapts these procedures to children with autism. Participants were TA, an 11-year-old boy, and KS, a 15-year-old girl, both with autism and speech sound disorders. For each participant, 3 sets of 10 words with specific blends in the initial position were targeted for training. Vocal imitation training with within-stimulus prompts was used for both participants. For KS, lip-tongue-teeth position prompts and chaining were added during the training of certain words. A multiple-baseline across-behaviors (word sets with target blends) design demonstrated improvement in the articulation of trained words and generalization of correct articulation to untrained words with both participants. The findings suggest that speech sound disorders in children with autism can be addressed with behavioral interventions.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2020 · doi:10.1007/s40617-019-00362-5