Procedures for teaching appropriate gestural communication skills to children with autism.
Modeling, prompting, and praise quickly teach children with autism to pair gestures with words, and the skill spreads to new places.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four children with autism took part. The team wanted to teach them to use gestures and words together.
They used a simple plan: show the gesture, prompt the child, and give praise or a treat when the child copied. The study ran a multiple baseline across different gestures so each child served as their own control.
What they found
Every child learned the new gestures and paired them with the right words. The skills showed up with new toys, new rooms, and new people. To outside observers, the kids now looked like typical peers.
How this fits with other research
Barall et al. (2026) copied the same prompting package and got the same good results, but only for pointing. The 1998 paper went further and taught a wider set of gestures.
Argott et al. (2017) took the 1998 recipe and added short videos. The kids still learned, showing the method can grow without breaking.
Aal Ismail et al. (2022) pooled many studies like this one and found the whole field keeps getting the same upbeat answer: prompting plus praise works for social starts.
Why it matters
You already have the tools to teach gestures: model, prompt, reinforce. Start with one clear gesture, like waving or pointing. When the child uses it with a word, give immediate praise. Once it works in your room, try it in the hallway, then on the playground. The child will look more natural and peers will respond more often.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Four children with autism were taught to use gestures in combination with oral communication. Using a multiple-baseline across-responses design, intervention was introduced successively across three response categories containing gestures representative of attention-directing/getting, affective, and descriptive behavior. Although none of the participants displayed appropriate gestural and verbal responses during baseline, all participants acquired this skill with the systematic implementation of modeling, prompting, and reinforcement. Generalization measures indicated that the children learned to respond in the presence of novel stimuli and a novel setting. Social validity measures revealed that the participants' behavior appeared more socially appropriate at the completion of the study than at the start of the study, and that the participants' behavior was indistinguishable from that of their typically developing peers.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1998 · doi:10.1023/a:1026056229214