Background and aims Word learning is an area that poses a particular challenge to children with autism spectrum disorder. A unique challenge for this population is generalization of learned skills across new learning contexts. In clinical settings, a common assumption in teaching vocabulary for children with autism spectrum disorder is that learning in one modality will generalize incidentally to untreated modalities, but very few studies have evaluated the validity of this assumption. The purpose of this study was to investigate receptive and expressive word acquisition and cross-modal generalization in children with autism spectrum disorder. Methods A single-case parallel treatments design was used to compare word learning and cross-modal generalization in children with autism spectrum disorder. Ten children with autism spectrum disorder were taught unfamiliar vocabulary words in a combined storybook and play intervention. For each child, half of the target words were trained expressively and the other half were trained receptively by random assignment. No direct cross-modal instruction was delivered. A series of probe sessions were completed to assess participants’ within-modal learning and cross-modal generalization of vocabulary learning. Results All children learned target words in both receptive and expressive conditions, as evidenced by an average of 80% accuracy across three trials at the end of each intervention. Overall, cross-modal generalization was higher for the expressive-to-receptive direction than for the receptive-to expressive direction. Nine out of ten children demonstrated successful cross-modal generalization on the expressive-to-receptive probes and only three children demonstrated successful cross-modal generalization on the receptive-to-expressive probes. Large variability was observed with regard to number of intervention sessions needed to reach mastery criterion and there were individual patterns of word learning. Conclusion Contrary to the assumption that vocabulary learning will be “automatically” generalized across modalities, results from this study indicate that cross-modal generalization at the word level is not automatic nor consistent in children with autism spectrum disorder, particularly in the receptive-to-expressive direction. Implications The finding that more children demonstrated expressive-to-receptive generalization than the opposite direction suggests that targeting expressive vocabulary first with the goal of incidentally increasing receptive vocabulary may be more efficient than starting with the receptive modality. Additionally, the finding that not all children demonstrated successful expressive-to-receptive cross-modal generalization indicates that teaching vocabulary in the expressive modality exclusively does not guarantee receptive understanding in this population. We recommend that practitioners periodically monitor children’s vocabulary learning in both modalities or set an explicit generalization goal to ensure complete learning of trained words.

中文翻译：

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自闭症谱系障碍儿童接受和表达词汇的跨模态概括

背景和目标单词学习是一个对自闭症谱系障碍儿童构成特殊挑战的领域。对于这一人群来说，一个独特的挑战是在新的学习环境中普及所学技能。在临床环境中，自闭症谱系障碍儿童词汇教学中的一个常见假设是，以一种方式进行学习将偶然地推广到未经治疗的方式，但是很少有研究评估这种假设的有效性。这项研究的目的是调查自闭症谱系障碍儿童的接受性和表达性单词习得以及交叉模态概括。方法采用单例平行治疗设计，比较自闭症谱系障碍儿童的单词学习和交叉模态概括。十个自闭症谱系障碍儿童在一个综合的故事书和游戏干预中教了不熟悉的词汇。对于每个孩子，通过随机分配对目标词中的一半进行表达性训练，对另一半进行接受性训练。没有提供直接的跨模式指令。完成了一系列的探索性会议，以评估参与者的词汇内学习和跨模式概括。结果所有儿童在接受和表达条件下都学习了目标词，每次干预结束时三项试验的平均准确率均达到80％。总体而言，跨模态泛化对于表达方向到接受方向的表达要高于接受方向到表达的方向。十分之九的儿童在表达-受体探针上成功地完成了交叉模态泛化，只有三个儿童在受体-表达探针上成功地完成了交叉模态泛化。在达到精通标准所需的干预次数方面，观察到了很大的差异，并且单词学习存在个体模式。结论与词汇学习将跨模式“自动”概括的假设相反，这项研究的结果表明，自闭症谱系障碍儿童（尤其是接受语言的儿童）在单词层面的跨模式综合不是自动的也不是一致的表达方向。启示发现更多的孩子表现出表达到接受的普遍性比相反的方向表明，首先以表达词汇为目标，以偶然增加接受词汇的目标可能比以接受模态开始更有效。此外，并非所有孩子都表现出成功的从表达到接受的跨模态概括的发现表明，在表达形式上教授词汇完全不能保证该人群的接受理解。我们建议从业人员定期以两种方式监视儿童的词汇学习，或设定明确的概括目标，以确保完全学习受训单词。