The Effects of Dialogic Reading Intervention on Verbal Interaction and Engagement in Young Autistic Children: A Randomized Controlled Preliminary Study.
Three quick dialogic reads a week pull more words and attention from autistic preschoolers than standard story time.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hou et al. (2025) ran a four-week randomized trial. They compared dialogic reading to regular story time for preschoolers with autism.
Kids got three short sessions each week. Staff asked open questions, waited, and expanded on child answers.
The team tracked how many comments and questions each child made during books. They also watched engagement and checked new books for carry-over.
What they found
Children in the dialogic group talked more. They answered more questions and added their own comments.
Engagement scores rose. Kids stayed with the book longer and looked at pages more.
Skills moved to new stories only a little. Gains stayed strongest in the trained books.
How this fits with other research
Lo et al. (2021) ran a similar RCT with RECALL, a parent-led dialogic program. Both studies show the same core result: prompting during story time lifts language and engagement. RECALL added a parent prompt hierarchy; Wenwen kept it simple with staff delivery.
Shams et al. (2025) used structured oral language games at snack and circle time. Like Wenwen, they saw expressive gains, proving the boost is not tied to one method.
Ferguson et al. (2020) watched parents read without training. They found autistic preschoolers join in less. Wenwen’s trial shows the gap closes once adults use dialogic moves.
Why it matters
You can add dialogic reading to any preschool circle tomorrow. Ask a question, wait five seconds, then build on the child’s answer. Three short reads a week are enough to see more language and fuller engagement. Start with favorite books; add new ones later as kids gain confidence.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The current study investigated whether dialogic reading could improve the verbal response, initiation of communication (questioning and commenting), receptive vocabulary and task engagement in 14 children with autism by using a randomized controlled trial. Moreover, we explored whether the effect of dialogic reading could be generalized to new books. Nine children with autism (mean age = 5.32 years, SD = 1.08) were randomly assigned to the dialogic reading group and five children (mean age = 5.25 years, SD = 1.18) were assigned to the standard book reading group. All children participated in four stages: pre-test, intervention, post-test, and generalization. The intervention was conducted over a four-week period, with three sessions per week, for a total of 12 sessions. We found that during the intervention, children in the dialogic reading group showed significant improvements in responding to adult questions and initiating comments compared with children in the standard book reading group. In addition, the dialogic reading facilitated the vocabulary knowledge and reduced the level of disengagement of children with autism. Further, children in the dialogic reading group could generalize the learned communication skills to new books, although this effect merely reached a marginal significance. Overall, these findings provide unique evidence for the effects of dialogic reading on promoting verbal interaction in children with autism and have great implications for intervention practices.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1037/0012-1649.30.5.679