Research On Characteristics And Intervention Of Conversational Ability In The Mandarin-Speaking Children With Autism

Conversational ability is one of the core ability of children's language use,which is of great significance to children's overall language learning and development.However,autistic children have obstacles in conversation,which adversely affects their life,study,communication and interaction,making it difficult for autistic children to adapt to their social life.The current research on conversational ability mainly focuses on children's performance shown during conversation,less attention is paid to the conversational understanding which is the premise of participation.Based on this situation,this study aims to analyze the characteristics of conversational ability of autistic children from the perspective of conversational understanding and conversational skills.In order to explore overall characteristics of autistic children's conversational ability,their performance were compared with those of typically developmenting children who have matching vocabulary level.This paper also proposes an intervention model and uses a single experimental design to verify its validation in two autistic children.The specific research results are as follows:1.Research on conversational skills in children with autism(1)Children's conversational skills are singnificantly affected by topics:compared to topical conversations that require more spoken language,contextual dialogues are more interactive and tend to cause more non-verbally participation,thereby reducing the threshold for children to participate in conversations.(2)The amount of speech maintenance,non-speech maintenance,speech initiation and non-speech initiation generated by autistic children in the two types of conversational activities:topical dialogue and contextual dialogue,falled behind of typically developing children with matching vocabulary level.Indicating that autistic children have poor conversational skills despite they have a certain vocabulary ability.2.Research on conversational understanding in children with autism(1)Children's conversational understanding is significantly affected by conversational topics(p=0.023<0.05):the accuracy of"buying things"is higher than the topic of"my favorite toys",indicating that different topics have different difficulty to children.(2)Children's conversational understanding is significantly affected by the number of turns(p=0.000<0.01):two-turn and four-turn(p<0.01),four-turn and six-turn(p<0.01),six-turn and eight-turn(p<0.01)all both have significant differences in the accuracy of understanding.Indicating that the difficulty in understanding will increase significantly with each additional round of dialogue added.(3)In the first topic,there is significant difference between autistic children and vocabulary-matched normal children(?~2=10.811,p=0.029<0.05),while it is not in the second topic(?~2=1.898,p=0.754>0.05).It reveals that children with autism have a lacking of conversational understanding.(4)Compared with median level of typical developing children,65%autistic children show“weak understanding and weak expression”during conversation,and29%autistic children show"strong understanding and weak expression",which indicating that there is still a significant gap in conversational ability between autistic children and typically developing children.3.Intervention study on conversational ability of children with autism(1)Using a single test research,it reveals that the conversational ladder training strategy has an immediate intervention effect on the maintenance and initiation of conversation in autistic children.(2)The effect of conversational ladder training strategy cant be maintained and generalized to a certain extent,but the stereotyped characteristics of autistic children will still cause conversation interruption.(3)The teacher holds a positive attitude that the conversational ladder training strategy can improve autistic children's conversational ability.The significance of this study is to comprehensively explore the developmental characteristics of autistic children's conversational ability,including the characteristics of conversational understanding and conversational skills,and also make a comparison between autistic children and typically developing children with matching vocabulary levels.Based on the characteristics,a conversation ability intervention strategy is proposed and applied,which provides a useful reference for the research and clinical training of conversation intervention in autistic children.