Efficacy of Therapist-Implemented Social Communication Intervention for Young Children with ASD

Background: Project ImPACT (Ingersoll & Dvortcsak, 2010) is a naturalistic parent training curriculum that teaches parents of young children with ASD to promote their child’s social communication using a systematic blend of developmental and naturalistic behavioral intervention techniques.  Each individual intervention technique has been found to be efficacious for increasing social communication in children with ASD or related disorders in previous research, either in isolation or as part of a larger intervention package.  However, the efficacy of entire ImPACT intervention package has not yet been evaluated.

Objectives: The goal of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of the ImPACT intervention as implemented by trained therapists for increasing language and social engagement in young children with ASD.

Methods: A single-subject, multiple-baseline design was used to evaluate the effect of the intervention on language and social engagement in nine young children with ASD.  Children received 2 to 8 weeks of baseline followed by one hour of intervention twice a week for eight weeks implemented by trained therapists.  Language and play skills were targeted separately for the first five children in 30-minute blocks and concurrently for the second four children.  Rate of use of expressive language targets and percent of intervals of joint engagement with the therapist were scored for all sessions.

Results: Preliminary data indicate that the children increased their rates of expressive language and the amount of time they spent in joint engagement with the therapist with the onset of treatment.  Improvements generalized to novel situations and maintained at a 1 month follow-up.  Language and joint engagement gains were evident when language the sole target and when language and play were targeted concurrently.

Conclusions: This study demonstrates the preliminary efficacy of the Project ImPACT intervention for targeting social communication in young children with ASD.  Research examining the efficacy of this intervention when implemented within a parent-training model is underway.