The Effect of Reciprocal Imitation Training on Increasing Expressive Vocabulary of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

"Objective: One of the areas of impairment in childhood autism spectrum disorders is delayed imitation. Due to the defect in the social function of imitation in these children and its negative consequences on lexical and verbal skills, Researchers in the field of educating autistic children consider increasing imitation skills to be a very important therapeutic goal. Previous studies have shown the effects of improving imitation on increasing the social, linguistic, and verbal skills of these children. In the present study, the effect of reciprocal imitation training on increasing the vocabulary of autistic children was investigated. Materials and Methods: This was an interventional study with a pretest-posttest design. 16 autistic children were trained in crossborder imitation based on expressive vocabulary in 96 sessions. After performing post-test and data collection in data analysis from the McNemar test to determine the changes of each word before and after the intervention and the Wilcoxon Marked Test was used to determine changes in vocabulary categories before and after the intervention and the level of statistical significance was considered (P> 0.05). Results: The results of data analysis show that the average number of responses ""expresses"" in each of the words after the intervention increased significantly in all vocabulary groups (P> 0.05). It seems that the intervention resulted in significant changes in participants. Conclusion: The results of this study show that teaching the method of reciprocal imitation has a significant effect on increasing the number of expressive words in autistic children. "