Social Stories: Improving Responses of Students with Autism with Accurate Social Information

Autism is characterized by a chronic, severe impairment in social relations. Recent studies of language in autism also show pervasive deficits in pragmatics. We assume, uncontroversially, that these two deficits are linked, since pragmatics is part of social competence. This paper reviews the literature describing these deficits, and then considers two different psychological theories of these phenomena: the Affective theory and the Cognitive theory. Although the Affective theory makes better sense of the results from emotional recognition tasks, the Cognitive theory predicts the particular pattern of impaired and unimpaired social skills in autism, as well as the pragmatic deficits. These two theories might usefully be integrated in the future.

We assessed the effects of video modeling on acquisition and generalization of conversational skills among autistic children. Three autistic boys observed videotaped conversations consisting of two people discussing specific toys. When criterion for learning was met, generalization of conversational skills was assessed with untrained topics of conversation; new stimuli (toys); unfamiliar persons, siblings, and autistic peers; and other settings. The results indicated that the children learned through video modeling, generalized their conversational skills, and maintained conversational speech over a 15-month period. Video modeling shows much promise as a rapid and effective procedure for teaching complex verbal skills such as conversational speech.