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Volume 14, Number 2 2012
Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology
due to pre-treatment differences. The authors also provided
adequate follow-up, certifying that sufficient data was
available to support the results provided.
The demonstration of PECS, a trained behaviour, in
an untrained context is now supported by this research.
This research is important for clinicians and families of
children with autism, because it reassures us that PECS
will generalise to different situations outside of the therapy
room. This generalisation of a skill to the many changing
situations and environments of everyday life is the ultimate
goal of intervention. We can now feel confident using the
PECS intervention with children with autism in a clinical
setting because the learned skills will transfer to other
environments as well, such as the client’s home.
References
Bondy, A. S., & Frost, L. A. (1994).
PECS: The Picture
Exchange Communication System training manual
. Cherry
Hill, NJ: Pyramid Educational Consultants.
Mundy, P. C., Hogan, A. E., & Doehring, P. J. (1996).
A preliminary manual for the abridged early social
communication scales (ESCS)
. Coral Gables, FL: University
of Miami.
Yoder, P. J., & Stone, W. L. (2006). Randomized
comparison of twocommunication interventions for
preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders.
Journal of
Consulting and Clinical Psychology
,
74
, 426–435.
Yoder, P. J., & Warren, S. F. (2002). Effects of prelinguistic
milieu teaching and parent responsivity education on dyads
involving children with intellectual disabilities.
Journal of
Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
,
45
, 1158–1174.
Home-based intervention for children with autism
McConkey, R., Truesdale-Kennedy, M., Crawford, H.,
McGreevy, E., Reavey, M., & Cassidy, A. (2010).
Preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders: Evaluating
the impact of a home-based intervention to promote their
communication.
Early Child Development and Care
,
180
,
299–315. speechBITE rating 3/10
speechBITE review - Morin Beausoleil
and Tricia McCabe
At-home communication-based intervention approaches for
children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are common
practice among parents and speech-language pathologists.
But a couple of questions arise: how effective are these
approaches? and, what developmental gains will the child
make as a result of parental guidance and training?
This article evaluated the effectiveness of home-based
interventions to preschool children with a confirmed
diagnosis of ASD. The study used an early intervention
program called Keyhole, that was based on the Treatment
and Education of Autistic and Related Communications
Handicapped Children (TEACCH) approach (Schopler,
Brehm, Kinsbourne, & Reichler, 1971), as well as two
other approaches aimed at promoting communication and
interaction between parent and child, such as the Picture
Exchange Communication System (PECS) (Charlop-Christy,
Carpenter, Le, Leblanc, & Kellet, 2002) and the Hanen
“More than Words” program (Pepper & Weizman, 2004).
The current study also looked at parental perceptions of the
therapy design and the effect of this Keyhole program.
The study included children from Northern Ireland
between 2 and 4 years of age. Two speech-language
symbols. You can do your own research to determine
which is more efficient – static versus animated symbols.
Generalisation of PECS training to other
communication situations
Yoder, P. J., & Lieberman, R. G. (2010). Brief report:
Randomized test of the efficacy of Picture Exchange
Communication System on highly generalized picture
exchanges in children with ASD.
Journal of Autism and
Developmental Disorders
,
40
, 629–632.
speechBITE rating 6/10
speechBITE review – Caitlin Winkelman
and Tricia McCabe
Carry-over of learned skills and behaviours beyond the
therapy room or training environment is the ultimate goal of
speech and language intervention. Despite its worldwide
recognition and extensive clinical use, there have been few
studies investigating the generalisation of the Picture
Exchange Communication System (PECS; Bondy & Frost,
1994). While some past research studying the efficiency of
PECS has included generalisation measurements, these
measures have failed to determine the extent to which
PECS is generalised to contexts that are unlike the
treatment conditions. The purpose of this study was to
measure the “generality” of PECS, looking at whether the
skill generalises to environments that are different from the
environment where the behaviour was taught.
The authors used a sample of children from a study
by Yoder and Stone (2006) that compared two different
communication interventions for children with autism. In
this study, 33 children with autism and 3 with a diagnosis of
pervasive developmental disorder were randomly assigned
to two treatment groups. The inclusion criteria required
that participants were between the ages of 18 and 60
months, used fewer than 10 words, and had passed a
hearing screening. One group was assigned to receive the
PECS intervention, while the control group received the
Responsive Education and Prelinguistic Milieu Teaching
(RPMT; Yoder & Warren, 2002). The children were assessed
using four different measures before and after treatment;
however, the measure specifically reported in this paper
was the Early Social Communication Scales-Abridged
(ESCS-Abridged; Mundy, Hogan, & Doehring, 1996). The
authors claimed this measure was a good indicator of
generalisation because the examiner, setting, activities, and
materials were different from that of the treatment sessions.
The dependent variable examined from pre-treatment to
post-treatment was the total number of picture exchanges.
The researchers found significant differences between
pre- and post-treatment in the group that received the
PECS intervention but not in the RPMT group. These
findings suggest that the learned skill was generalised from
the treatment context to the dissimilar context for those
who received PECS, while there was not a strong indicator
of generalisation for participants in the control group.
These findings are supported by a research design with
strong internal validity through randomisation, blinding,
comparable groups at baseline, and adequate follow-up.
As a randomised control trial, participants were randomly
allocated to either the PECS or RMPT groups. The study
also had blinded assessors, which prevents biased results,
as well as strong comparability of groups at baseline,
assuring us that the post-treatment differences were not