Teaching conversational speech to children with autism spectrum disorder using text‐message prompting
Text-message prompts during home play rapidly lift conversational speech in young children with autism.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Grosberg et al. (2017) sent text-message prompts to parents during home play. The goal was to help young children with autism talk more with peers.
They used a multiple-baseline design across kids. Each family got texts like "Ask Johnny what he likes to eat." The team tracked spoken turns.
What they found
The texts worked. Conversational turns rose quickly for every child. The gains lasted one month and showed up with new friends and in new rooms.
How this fits with other research
Jaffe et al. (2002) first showed that written prompts beat spoken ones for teaching question answers. Grosberg moves the same idea to phones and real chat.
Moon et al. (2024) took the concept further. They placed smart prompts inside VR games for tweens. Both studies show tech prompts keep kids talking.
Simmons et al. (2016) also used a mobile app, but for prosody. Their gains were weaker, hinting that simple text cues may beat fancy apps for basic speech.
Why it matters
You can copy this in minutes. Pick a peer play date, set phone alerts, and script one open question per alert. No extra staff, no cost, and parents like the buzz. Start with one text every two minutes, then fade to zero as talking flows.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The present study was designed to teach conversational speech using text-message prompts to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in home play settings with siblings and peers. A multiple baseline design across children was used. Children learned conversational speech through the text-message prompts, and the behavior generalized across peers and settings. Maintenance of treatment gains was seen at 1-month follow-up probes. Social validity measures indicated that parents of typically developing children viewed the participants' conversational speech as much improved after the intervention. Results are discussed in terms of the efficacy of text-message prompts as a promising way to improve conversational speech for children with ASD.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2017 · doi:10.1002/jaba.403