The Efficacy of a Visual Auditory Bombardment Intervention (VABI) Versus Traditional Video Modeling Intervention (VMI) in Students with Pragmatic Language Impairments

Abstract

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Asperger Syndrome (AS), and Social Communication Disorder (SCD) have deficits in the area of pragmatic (i.e., social) language. Individuals may have difficulty staying on topic, changing topic, providing appropriate comments/questions, using appropriate eye contact, and interpreting and utilizing nonverbal language such as facial expressions, gestures, as well as, changes in prosody/intonation. As speech and language assessments have become more distinguished, intervention approaches have also become more specialized. The current study aims to evaluate a visual auditory bombardment intervention (VABI) designed to target pragmatic language and compare this intervention to a traditional video modeling (VMI) condition, as well as a no-treatment condition (CON). Results of the current study revealed significant differences between the VABI and CON groups in the areas of paralinguistic decoding and paralinguistic signals scores. On the paralinguistic signal measure, the VMI group demonstrated a small effect size compared to the CON group. Additionally, results revealed that the VABI group’s post-intervention scores were larger than the CON group. There was a significant effect size on all social language compression measures for individuals in the VABI group compared to the CON group, and a negligible effect size for the difference between the VMI and CON groups. The key findings of this study are both the CAPs and CASL-2 are effective tools in assessing individuals with pragmatic language deficits. Additionally, the VABI intervention proved to be an effective treatment approach of student’s understanding and use of affective expression, paralinguistic decoding, and paralinguistic signals.