Experimental Studies On Pretend Play Of Children With Autism

Deficiency in pretend play is recognized as one of the main clinical diagnostic criteria for autism. This thesis reviews and discusses the main theories of pretend play and related research findings about children with autism. A series of experimental studies on pretend play of autistic children were conducted by analyzing the play behavior of autistic children under spontaneous and modeling context, as well as their competence of understanding pretence. The aim of this research is to explore the cognitive characteristics of pretend play of autistic children, investigate the causes of deficiency in pretend play and to empirically answer the questions about the cognitive capacity of autistic children.In this experimental study,20 children with autism,20 children with mental retardation and 20 typical children were matched on receptive verbal age. All of the participants were involved in 3 experiments:play behavior of children under spontaneous context, play behavior of children under modeling context and children's comprehension of pretence. The results revealed that:(1) Children with autism rarely played pretend play in daily activities, even though, they usually played alone; (2) The incidence of pretend play behavior of autistic children was significantly lower than children from control groups under spontaneous context, however, the distribution of the types of pretend play did not show difference between groups; (3) Under modeling context, the incidence of autistic children's pretend play was improved significantly, and no significant difference of children's pretend play existed between groups. Although autistic children played novel pretend play, its incidence was still relatively lower than imitative pretend play. The distribution of the types of both novel and imitative pretend play revealed no difference between groups; (4) The comprehension of pretence was found no significant difference between groups, however, when the experimenter acted pretence with materials which were highly decontextualized, a deficit was still seen on the performance of autistic children.The results of this research show that a deficiency indeed exists in the spontaneous pretend play of children with autism, but they still have certain competence to understand pretence, and they could play pretend play after appropriate modeling. Based on the results of this research, the cognitive ability of autistic children has been verified which implicated a new direction of clinical intervention. Issues about the cognitive theory and the intervention about autistic children's pretend play are discussed. In addition, the direction of future research is also highlighted.