Robot-based play-drama intervention may improve the narrative abilities of Chinese-speaking preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have deficits in their narrative skills and gestural communication. Very few intervention studies have been conducted with the aim of improving these skills. We examined whether children with ASD who received the robot-based drama intervention had better narrative abilities and gestured more often than their peers who did not receive the intervention. Preschool children were randomly assigned to the intervention group (N = 13) and waitlist control group (N = 13). Children in the intervention group watched three robot dramas and engaged in roleplays with both robots and human experimenters. Children in both groups took the pre-tests, immediate post-tests, and, two week later, delayed post-tests, in which they narrated three stories. There were significant improvements in various narrative measures, including narrative length, syntactic complexity, narrative structure, and cognitive inferences, in the intervention group. There was also an improvement in the average number of overall gestures per clause in this condition. These learning outcomes were maintained in the delayed post-test. These patterns were not found in the waitlist control group. A robot-based play-drama intervention can enhance the narrative abilities and gestural communication of children with ASD.