1Psychiatrist, Assistant Professor, Medical Science, Shahed University, Tehran, Iran
2Linguistics, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
Introduction: Human growth is dependent on social interactions. As a significant part of the human entity, language plays a crucial role in this regard. Humans communicate through verbal and nonverbal languages. Conversational skills are the most important pragmatics skills, and children with autism spectrum disorder suffer from significant deficits in pragmatics, and because of this they face successive communication failures due to impaired pragmatic and conversational skills. Thus, developing treatment methods that focus on improving the conversational skills of these children is especially important. The present study aims at evaluating the function of pragmatic skills and the severity of this disorder in 60 Persian speaking children with autism aged 4 - 10. The participants were randomly divided into two groups. The first group consisted of 30 autistic children who received the interventional method of reciprocal imitation and the second group encompassed 30 autistic children undergoing the effectiveness of the cognitive model- a cybernetic-based approach-on enhancing the speech of children with autism.
Awareness of how this approach works and its effectiveness on improving language and social skills can be a guide for therapeutic protocols to improve the development of theory of mind in children with a variety of language disorders.
Methods: This is a descriptive-analytical study. The instrument used in this study was the Children's Communication Checklist, 2nd edition to measure the pragmatic skills and the Childhood Autism Rating Scale-Second Edition (CARS-2). All of these children were also evaluated by a child psychiatrist and a child neurologist and investigation was based on autism criteria and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-V). Eventually, the data were analyzed by independent t-test in R environment.
Results: A significant difference was observed between autistic subjects and standard scores, i.e. there was a significant difference (p < 0.001) between the scores of autistic subjects receiving reciprocal imitation training and those undergoing cognitive intervention.
Conclusion: By and large, it can be concluded that undergoing cognitive treatment method, can be effective in treating language disorder in children with autism.
Keywords: Reciprocal Imitation Training; Cognitive Treatment Method; Pragmatics; Autism
Masoud Moghaddamnia and Maryam Khalilkhaneh. The Effectiveness of Imitative and Cognitive Methods on Pragmatic Skills in Autistic Children. EC Paediatrics 12.9 (2023): 01-13.
© 2023 Masoud Moghaddamnia and Maryam Khalilkhaneh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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