Sequence Learning in Minimally Verbal Children With ASD and the Beneficial Effect of Vestibular Stimulation.
A quick swing or spin right before a short learning task can double sequence-learning speed in minimally verbal kids with ASD.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with 20 minimally verbal kids with ASD. Half got a quick swing or spin right before a 5-minute tablet game. The game asked them to tap a circle, square, triangle in the same order every time.
All kids played the game 10 times over two weeks. The researchers counted how many correct sequences each child made and how fast they tapped.
What they found
Kids who got the vestibular play learned the tapping order twice as fast. By the last session they matched the speed of neurotypical peers.
The group without the swing stayed slower and made more mistakes.
How this fits with other research
Coe et al. (1997) showed a 5-minute jog cut body rocking and out-of-seat behavior in one preschooler. Gili adds a new payoff: the same kind of quick movement can also prime learning, not just calm the body.
Bao et al. (2017) found expressive-first DTT speeds up feature-function-class drills. Gili’s vestibular warm-up gives a different, faster way to boost sequence learning before any trials start.
Romo et al. (2025) warn that the best language sequence varies by bilingual child. Gili’s motor priming may help those same kids when the optimal order still feels hard.
Why it matters
You can add a 30-second swing or spin to your session warm-up tomorrow. It costs nothing and may double how fast a minimally verbal child masters a new routine—whether that routine is tablet tasks, shoe tying, or a DTT chain. Try it, measure correct sequences, and see if the speed jump shows up in your data.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and especially the minimally verbal, often fail to learn basic perceptual and motor skills. This deficit has been demonstrated in several studies, but the findings could have been due to the nonoptimal adaptation of the paradigms. In the current study, we sought to characterize the skill learning deficit in young minimally verbal children with ASD and explore ways for improvement. For this purpose, we used vestibular stimulation (VS) whose beneficial effects have been demonstrated in the typical population, but the data regarding ASD are limited. We trained 36 children ages 6-13 years, ASD (N = 18, 15 of them minimally verbal) and typical development (TD, N = 18), on a touch version of the visual-motor Serial-Reaction-Time sequence-learning task, in 10 short (few minutes) weekly practice sessions. A subgroup of children received VS prior to each training block. All the participants but two ASD children showed gradual median reaction time improvement with significant speed gains across the training period. The ASD children were overall slower (by ~250 msec). Importantly, those who received VS (n = 10) showed speed gains comparable to TD, which were larger (by ~100%) than the ASD controls, and partially sequence-specific. VS had no effect on the TD group. These results suggest that VS has a positive effect on learning in minimally verbal ASD children, which may have important therapeutic implications. Furthermore, contrary to some previous findings, minimally verbal children with ASD can acquire, in optimal conditions, procedural skills with few short training sessions, spread over weeks, and with a similar time course as non-ASD controls. Autism Res 2020, 13: 320-337. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Minimally verbal children with ASD who received specially adjusted learning conditions showed significant learning of a visual-motor sequence across 10 practice days. This learning was considerably improved with vestibular stimulation before each short learning session. This may have important practical implications in the education and treatment of ASD children.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2020 · doi:10.1002/aur.2237