Brief Report: A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Effects of RECALL (Reading to Engage Children with Autism in Language
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BRIEF REPORT
Brief Report: A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Effects of RECALL (Reading to Engage Children with Autism in Language and Learning) for Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder Jennie Ying Tung Lo1 · Kathy Kar‑Man Shum1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This study investigated the effects of a parent-implemented dialogic reading approach—Reading to Engage Children with Autism in Language and Learning (RECALL)—on the engagement in reading and inference-making ability for preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Thirty-one preschoolers (mean age = 5.90 years, SD = 0.69; 26 boys, 5 girls) were randomly assigned to a treatment or control group. Six weeks of RECALL significantly enhanced story comprehension, emotion knowledge, and reading engagement among preschoolers in the treatment group. This might be the first randomized controlled trial testing the effects of RECALL on children with ASD. Our findings suggest that additional instructional support such as the application of a prompting hierarchy during dialogic reading might help children with ASD reap greater benefits from shared book reading. Keywords Autism spectrum disorder · Preschoolers · Dialogic reading · Intervention · Randomized controlled trial
Introduction Shared book reading, where an adult reads a storybook with a child and encourages interaction through questioning and discussion about the book (Hudson and Test 2011), has been shown to benefit oral language and emergent literacy skills (Sénéchal and Young 2008; Trivette et al. 2010; Van Kleeck et al. 2006). Nonetheless, young children with ASD are found to enjoy shared book reading less (Lanter et al. 2013) and spend less time on it than their language-matched peers (Watson et al. 1996). Difficulties experienced by children with ASD in shared book reading may partly stem from the social and communicative demands of the activity. In particular, it requires children to be able to sustain social interaction by asking and responding to questions based on the content of the Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04692-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Kathy Kar‑Man Shum [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, China
book. This can be challenging for children with ASD as they often show marked difficulty in establishing joint attention and social reciprocity, and exhibit delays in language development (Tager-Flusberg et al. 2005). Moreover, due to impaired social cognition, children with ASD may find it hard to discern others’ thoughts and feelings both in conversation and in text (Loveland and Tunali-Kotoski 2005), and have trouble understanding what they read (Brown et al. 2013; Ricketts et al. 2013). The ability to draw inferences based on implicit information predicts future reading comprehension (Nation and Norbury 2005; Oakhill and Cain 2007). Indeed, c
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