The effect of a script-fading procedure on social interactions among young children with autism

Background: Autism is a disorder characterized by a severe deficit in social-interaction skills. The script-fading procedure is an effective behavior-analytic strategy for teaching social-interaction skills to people with autism. Within the script-fading literature, however, few researchers have established cues in the natural environment as the discriminative stimuli for social interactions. Method: The purpose of this study was to replicate the script-fading procedure used by Brown, Krantz, McClannahan, and Poulson (2008) to teach children with autism to interact with each other, and to assess generalization across untrained stimuli. The three participants, ages 6-9 years, demonstrated deficits in peer-interaction skills. Results: During the baseline condition, the participants either did not interact with one another or emitted a variable and unreliable number of interactions. With the introduction of the script-fading procedure, however, interactions increased systematically. Moreover, stimulus generalization data indicated that the script-fading procedure effectively transferred the discriminative control for interacting from the scripts to stimuli in the natural environment. Conclusions: These findings demonstrated the effectiveness of the script-fading procedure in teaching children with autism to interact with their peers. In addition, this study showed that establishing cues in the natural environment as discriminative stimuli for social interactions is a successful strategy to teach social-interaction skills to people with autism. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.