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Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders Essay

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Introduction Early intervention, or intervention provided to children from the ages of birth to three, is a growing and perpetually more important portion of the profession of Speech-Language Pathology. With a growing evidence base supporting the idea that providing speech and language intervention early for children improves outcomes, children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and early Autism symptoms are of particular interest to the field. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have varying levels of impairments in language and communication, particularly in the domain of social interaction. The studies in this literature review were conducted to address gaps in research about language interventions for infants and toddlers with early Autism symptoms. The two interventions whose efficacies were tested in these randomized control trials were “Autism 1-2-3” (A 1-2-3) and Hanen’s “More Than Words” (HMTW). Both interventions focus not only on the child, but also on teaching the parents to implement early intervention strategies. In early intervention, the parents are the people with whom the child spends the majority of their time, therefore it is increasingly important that parents are empowered to enhance the communication skills of their children. A difficulty that both studies faced is the extreme variability that exists from child to child that has a diagnosis of ASD. A second difficulty was the time spans in which intervention was offered did not allow for

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