Development and evaluation of a simultaneous bilingual communication intervention protocol for autistic children
Blocked-then-shuffled bilingual mand training lets nonverbal autistic kids ask in the right language without extra discrimination lessons.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with nonverbal autistic children who lived in Spanish-English homes.
They taught the kids to ask for things in both languages during the same session.
First they ran several English-only trials, then Spanish-only trials.
Next they mixed the languages so the child had to pick the one the adult used.
What they found
Every child learned to ask for items in both languages.
They also used the right language with the right adult without extra teaching.
No child got confused or mixed the languages together.
How this fits with other research
Pak et al. (2024) also boosted Spanish communication, but they coached Latina moms through telehealth.
The new study adds a direct teaching script clinicians can use in any room.
Barbosa et al. (2025) and Domanska et al. (2022) got nonverbal preschoolers talking with AAC.
Those studies used pictures or devices, while Waits used spoken words in two languages.
The results line up: all show nonverbal kids can start requesting when we give the right cues.
Why it matters
If you serve bilingual families, you no longer need to pick one language.
Run a few blocked trials in each language, then shuffle.
The child learns whom to speak English with and whom to speak Spanish with.
You can start Monday with any toy and two adults who speak different languages.
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Join Free →Place the child’s favorite snack on a high shelf, run five English mand trials with the English-speaking tech, five Spanish trials with the Spanish-speaking parent, then shuffle who stands where while the child requests.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study explored bilingual approaches to establishing communication repertoires for culturally and linguistically diverse nonverbal autistic children. We explored concurrent English and Spanish mand instruction across language-specific contexts (i.e., blocked vs. shuffled language trials). Participants first received communication intervention in a blocked context (e.g., first half in English), followed by communication intervention in a mixed-language context (i.e., shuffled trials). Mixed-language probes were incorporated throughout the evaluations to detect the emergence of conditional discriminations specific to the present linguistic context (i.e., therapist language). Participants established linguistic discrimination for topographically distinct forms of functional communication with minimal formal language discrimination instruction. These findings suggest that a communication intervention including elements of bilingualism can be effective for both establishing functional communication and discriminating the contexts in which certain responses are likely to be reinforced (i.e., linguistic discrimination).
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2025 · doi:10.1002/jaba.70038