The Effects of Dialogic Reading Intervention on Verbal Interaction and Engagement in Young Autistic Children: A Randomized Controlled Preliminary Study.

The current study investigated whether dialogic reading could improve the verbal response, initiation of communication (questioning and commenting), receptive vocabulary and task engagement in 14 children with autism by using a randomized controlled trial. Moreover, we explored whether the effect of dialogic reading could be generalized to new books. Nine children with autism (mean age = 5.32 years, SD = 1.08) were randomly assigned to the dialogic reading group and five children (mean age = 5.25 years, SD = 1.18) were assigned to the standard book reading group. All children participated in four stages: pre-test, intervention, post-test, and generalization. The intervention was conducted over a four-week period, with three sessions per week, for a total of 12 sessions. We found that during the intervention, children in the dialogic reading group showed significant improvements in responding to adult questions and initiating comments compared with children in the standard book reading group. In addition, the dialogic reading facilitated the vocabulary knowledge and reduced the level of disengagement of children with autism. Further, children in the dialogic reading group could generalize the learned communication skills to new books, although this effect merely reached a marginal significance. Overall, these findings provide unique evidence for the effects of dialogic reading on promoting verbal interaction in children with autism and have great implications for intervention practices.