The development of a vocal mand repertoire is often delayed or deficient in children with an autism spectrum disorder. Utilizing caregivers as behavior change agents to address this core deficit may be advantageous as more learning opportunities can be incorporated in daily routines. A plethora of literature exists on teaching caregivers to promote communication with their children; however, many of these studies use behavioral skills training that can be resource-intensive. This study evaluated the effectiveness of video modeling with voice-over and on-screen text, without researcher mediation, as an alternative to behavioral skills training for teaching caregivers to teach vocal mands to their 2- to 5-year-old children with an autism spectrum disorder. The video model described mand training with an echoic prompt (Greer & Ross, 2008; Kodak & Clements, 2009), using a mnemonic (POWER: Play, Offer, Wait, Encourage, and Reinforce). Results of our nonconcurrent multiple baseline design across three dyads indicates that video modeling was effective in increasing all three caregivers’ mand training fidelity, and this correlated to small increases in independent mands with some of the child participants when training occurred less than 1 hr per week. We discuss implications for practice and areas for future research.

患有自闭症谱系障碍的儿童的发声能力发育通常会延迟或不足。利用护理人员作为行为改变推动者来解决这一核心缺陷可能是有利的，因为可以将更多的学习机会纳入日常生活中。有大量关于教导看护者促进与孩子沟通的文献；然而，其中许多研究使用的行为技能培训可能会占用大量资源。这项研究评估了在没有研究人员调解的情况下，使用画外音和屏幕文本进行视频建模作为行为技能培训的替代方案的有效性，以帮助护理人员向 2 至 5 岁的自闭症儿童传授发声命令频谱紊乱。视频模型描述了带有回声提示的命令训练（Greer & Ross, 2008；Kodak & Clements, 2009），使用助记符（POWER：Play、Offer、Wait、Encourage 和 Reinforce）。我们针对三对组的非并发多基线设计的结果表明，视频建模可以有效提高所有三名看护者的指令训练保真度，并且这与当每周训练时间少于 1 小时时，一些儿童参与者的独立指令小幅增加相关。我们讨论对实践和未来研究领域的影响。