Young children on the autism spectrum have minimal social interaction with their peers in inclusive preschool settings, thus limiting opportunities to build social relationships. Research indicates that explicitly training peers how to interact with classmates with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can increase the likelihood of peer-directed…

The advancing social-communication and play (ASAP) intervention was designed as a classroom-based intervention, in which the educational teams serving preschool-aged children with autism spectrum disorder are trained to implement the intervention in order to improve these children's social-communication and play skills. In this 4-year, multi-site…

Difficulty with social competence is a core deficit of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The aim of this study was to examine the link between adult talk and the socially competent behavior displayed by preschoolers with ASD concurrently and over time. A modified version of Kontos's Teacher Talk classification was used to code videos of 73 children…