A Longitudinal Study of the Acquisition of English Speech Sounds by a Minimally Verbal Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Case Study

This case study illustrates a brief, intensive, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for a young male client with a specific phobia of dogs and comorbid autism spectrum disorder (ASD). CBT has been shown to be an effective treatment for anxiety in children with ASD; however, this work has not often been extended to children with language impairment. This case study presents significant modifications to one-session treatment (OST) for specific phobia to make it applicable to a child with minimally verbal ASD. The intervention included four 3-hr treatment sessions conducted over the course of four consecutive days. Assessment sessions were conducted before treatment, and 1 week and 3 months following treatment. The client’s phobia symptoms decreased following the intervention at both the posttreatment and follow-up sessions. The Reliable Change Index (RCI) was calculated to evaluate changes from pretreatment to posttreatment and follow-up and demonstrated a clinically significant decrease in phobia symptomology following intervention. The results suggest the potential efficacy for a brief, intensive, and concentrated CBT treatment for a child with minimally verbal ASD and a severe phobia.

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Parent Education in Studies With Nonverbal and Minimally Verbal Participants With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review

American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology ◽

10.1044/2019_ajslp-19-00007 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 29 (2) ◽

pp. 890-902

Author(s):

Lynn Kern Koegel ◽

Katherine M. Bryan ◽

Pumpki Lei Su ◽

Mohini Vaidya ◽

Stephen Camarata

Keyword(s):

Systematic Review ◽

Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽

Parent Education ◽

Autism Spectrum ◽

Verbal Communication ◽

Fidelity Of Implementation ◽

Spectrum Disorder ◽

Education Programs ◽

Minimally Verbal ◽

Parent Education Programs

Purpose The purpose of this systematic review was to identify parent education procedures implemented in intervention studies focused on expressive verbal communication for nonverbal (NV) or minimally verbal (MV) children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Parent education has been shown to be an essential component in the habilitation of individuals with ASD. Parents of individuals with ASD who are NV or MV may particularly benefit from parent education in order to provide opportunities for communication and to support their children across the life span. Method ProQuest databases were searched between the years of 1960 and 2018 to identify articles that targeted verbal communication in MV and NV individuals with ASD. A total of 1,231 were evaluated to assess whether parent education was implemented. We found 36 studies that included a parent education component. These were reviewed with regard to (a) the number of participants and participants' ages, (b) the parent education program provided, (c) the format of the parent education, (d) the duration of the parent education, (e) the measurement of parent education, and (f) the parent fidelity of implementation scores. Results The results of this analysis showed that very few studies have included a parent education component, descriptions of the parent education programs are unclear in most studies, and few studies have scored the parents' implementation of the intervention. Conclusions Currently, there is great variability in parent education programs in regard to participant age, hours provided, fidelity of implementation, format of parent education, and type of treatment used. Suggestions are made to provide both a more comprehensive description and consistent measurement of parent education programs.

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A Case Study of the Animal-Assisted Therapy for the Changes of Social Interaction of an Elementary School Student with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Journal of Special Education ◽

10.31863/jse.2019.08.35.2.1 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 35 (2) ◽

pp. 1-29

Author(s):

Hye Bin Ko ◽

Eun Kyung Kim

Keyword(s):

Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽

Elementary School ◽

Social Interaction ◽

Autism Spectrum ◽

Spectrum Disorder ◽

Animal Assisted Therapy ◽

Elementary School Student

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Natural language processing (NLP) tools in extracting biomedical concepts from research articles: a case study on autism spectrum disorder

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making ◽

10.1186/s12911-020-01352-2 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 20 (S11) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jacqueline Peng ◽

Mengge Zhao ◽

James Havrilla ◽

Cong Liu ◽

Chunhua Weng ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽

Natural Language Processing ◽

Natural Language ◽

Language Processing ◽

Clinical Manifestations ◽

Predictive Performance ◽

Autism Spectrum ◽

Spectrum Disorder ◽

Research Articles

Abstract Background Natural language processing (NLP) tools can facilitate the extraction of biomedical concepts from unstructured free texts, such as research articles or clinical notes. The NLP software tools CLAMP, cTAKES, and MetaMap are among the most widely used tools to extract biomedical concept entities. However, their performance in extracting disease-specific terminology from literature has not been compared extensively, especially for complex neuropsychiatric disorders with a diverse set of phenotypic and clinical manifestations. Methods We comparatively evaluated these NLP tools using autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as a case study. We collected 827 ASD-related terms based on previous literature as the benchmark list for performance evaluation. Then, we applied CLAMP, cTAKES, and MetaMap on 544 full-text articles and 20,408 abstracts from PubMed to extract ASD-related terms. We evaluated the predictive performance using precision, recall, and F1 score. Results We found that CLAMP has the best performance in terms of F1 score followed by cTAKES and then MetaMap. Our results show that CLAMP has much higher precision than cTAKES and MetaMap, while cTAKES and MetaMap have higher recall than CLAMP. Conclusion The analysis protocols used in this study can be applied to other neuropsychiatric or neurodevelopmental disorders that lack well-defined terminology sets to describe their phenotypic presentations.

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Examining bidirectional relationships between parenting and child maladjustment in youth with autism spectrum disorder: A 9-year longitudinal study

Development and Psychopathology ◽

10.1017/s0954579416001243 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 29 (4) ◽

pp. 1199-1213 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Lisa M. Dieleman ◽

Sarah S. W. De Pauw ◽

Bart Soenens ◽

Wim Beyers ◽

Peter Prinzie

Keyword(s):

Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽

Longitudinal Study ◽

Problem Behaviors ◽

Externalizing Problems ◽

Autism Spectrum ◽

Spectrum Disorder ◽

Future Research ◽

Controlling Parenting ◽

Parents And Children ◽

Child Problems

AbstractLongitudinal bidirectional effects between parents and children are usually studied in samples of typically developing children, but remain understudied in families with a child with autism spectrum disorder. This three-wave longitudinal study examined how parents and children with autism spectrum disorder influence one another, relying on parent reports of parenting behaviors and children's problem behaviors across 9 years, in a sample of 139 youngsters (M age Time 1 = 10.2 years, 83% boys). Cross-lagged analyses indicated that children's externalizing problems at Time 1 predicted negative controlling parenting 6 years later (Time 2) that in turn predicted externalizing problems 3 years later (Time 3). Negative parental control at Time 1 also increased the risk for internalizing problems at Time 2. It was surprising that externalizing problems at Time 2 also predicted positive parental involvement at Time 3. Thus, although results indicate that externalizing problems generally elicit maladaptive reactions in parents, this study also suggests that parents adjust their way of reacting to externalizing child problems as their child reaches adolescence/emerging adulthood. Implications for future research on parenting dynamics in families with a child with autism spectrum disorder are discussed.

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Assessment and Treatment of Selective Mutism in a Child With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Clinical Case Studies ◽

10.1177/1534650120983451 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 153465012098345

Author(s):

Mirela Cengher ◽

Joy C. Clayborne ◽

Adrianna E. Crouch ◽

Julia T. O’Connor

Keyword(s):

Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽

Social Interaction ◽

Environmental Variables ◽

Behavioral Interventions ◽

Selective Mutism ◽

Autism Spectrum ◽

Spectrum Disorder ◽

Future Research ◽

Assessment And Treatment

Over 60% of children diagnosed with selective mutism are also diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Previous research established that behavioral interventions are effective at increasing speech in children with both diagnoses. However, few studies conducted assessments to determine environmental variables that inhibit speech, and such assessments are necessary for the development of effective and efficient treatments. This case study describes an assessment that evaluated the function(s) of selective mutism. The results confirmed that the participant did not talk to avoid social interaction and that mutism occurred primarily in the presence of multiple, unfamiliar people. Our first treatment focused on increasing tolerance for social interaction, demonstrated by an increase in speech production in the presence of unfamiliar people. Our second treatment focused on increasing qualitative aspects of the participant’s speech (i.e., both responses and initiations). Finally, we taught the participant’s parents to implement the treatment in naturalistic settings, and the participant demonstrated generalization of treatment effects across people and settings. Implications for clinical practice and future research are discussed.

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