Focused stimulation can be effective for children who do not enjoy adult-directed therapies and for children with strong IQ and expressive language skills, but weak language comprehension skills.
Therapies designed to treat children with language difficulties often rely on an adult leader who chooses activities and materials. In contrast, with focused stimulation, the child directs the activities and the adult follows the childâs lead. The adult gives the child many models of the language goal, but does not require an answer from the child. Rather the child learns from observing and listening. In this study the authors trained the parents of a 3 ½ year old child with autism how to provide focused stimulation. The language skill targeted was for the child to identify actions performed by a character (âWhat is X doing?â). Before treatment, the child could identify the character but not the action. After 6 weeks of treatment, the child successfully named the action 80% of the time. The parents reported that the child also could apply the new skill to language targets he had not practiced (generalization).
Or subscribe to feed using a feed reader.
