Teaching the Social Dance: Using Script-Fading Procedures to
Promote Conversation
Patricia Krantz,
Ph.D., Princeton Child Development Institute
This presentation describes teaching procedures that help
children with autism learn to engage in the give and take of
ordinary, daily conversation with parents, teachers, and peers. Our
research on these intervention strategies began in 1993, and
continues today. Scripts and script fading are not procedures for
teaching children to speak, but procedures for teaching them to
interact. These strategies help young people with autism learn the
nonverbal components of conversation (approaching and visually
attending to another person), as well as the verbal components
(initiating conversation, waiting quietly while others talk, and
then responding to what they say). We will discuss some of the
factors that interfere with the acquisition of social-interaction
skills and will show videotapes that illustrate scripts and
script-fading procedures. The goal of these intervention strategies
is to teach children to engage in real conversation with us.
Patricia J. Krantz, Ph.D., is Executive Director Emeritus of the
Princeton Child Development Institute. In 1999, the Society for the
Advancement of Behavior Analysis chose the Princeton Child
Development Institute as the recipient of the Award for Enduring
Programmatic Contributions in Behavior Analysis. Dr. Krantz holds
academic appointments at the University of Kansas and Queens
College of the City University of New York. Her current research
focuses on stimulus control procedures that increase spontaneous
generative language. She has made many international contributions
to autism intervention, including lectures at the British Institute
of Mental Handicap; the Congress of the European Association of
Behavior Therapy; the Dean's Leading Edge Lecture at Deakin
University, Victoria, Australia; at the Norwegian Association for
Behavior Analysis; and keynote addresses at the first conferences
on autism in the Soviet Union and in Poland. In 2000, she presented
a paper at Congrès Européen pour l'Analyse Expérimentale du
Comportement at Amiens, France. Dr. Krantz and her colleague, Lynn
E. McClannahan, have published many research articles on activity
schedules and script fading and have authored two books,
Activity schedules for children with autism: Teaching
independent behavior and Teaching conversation to children
with autism: Scripts and script fading.
BACB/APA CE credits offered for this
event