Changes in solitary play following acquisition of cooperative play by children with autism.

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of this study was to identify potential collateral changes in solitary play following the acquisition of cooperative play in three children with autism. An approach combining observation, verbal description and imitation of modeled interactive play, utilizing a multiple exemplar strategy, was applied to establish cooperative play. Both the number of consecutive play responses and the extent of response variability in the children's solitary play were assessed prior to, and immediately after criterion for mastery were met for cooperative play. A corresponding change in solitary play was found, both in terms of episode length and variability following mastery of cooperative play. The results were maintained at 3 and 14 months follow-up measures. Key Words: solitary functional play, cooperative play, response variability, children with autism. Introduction Descriptive accounts on the progression of play behavior in typical development are numerous, and the results on both sequencing of play forms and at what age one can expect different play forms to appear are fairly consistent across studies. During the first year of infancy, play is predominantly characterized by simple manipulation of objects such as mouthing, banging, sucking and throwing (e.g., Fenson, Kagan, Kearsley, & Zelazo, 1976). Functional play, which involves the capacity to handle objects as their function denotes (e.g., Libby, Powel, Messer, & Jordan, 1998), tends to emerge in the beginning of the second year and the number of functional acts increases linearly with increasing age (e.g., Belsky & Most, 1981; Largo & Howard, 1979). The ability to combine or relate objects into topic related sequences appears by the end of the second year and is a regular part of the child's play repertoire when around 30 months of age (e.g., Largo & Howard, 1979; Sinclear, 1970). Children with autism will not necessarily follow the transition from single play acts towards combinatorial functional play as seen in typical children. In fact, numerous studies have revealed deficits in functional play in this group (e.g., Jarrold, Boucher, & Smith, 1996; Lewis & Boucher, 1988; Sigman & Ungerer, 1984; Stone, Lemanek, Fichel, Fernandez, & Altmeier, 1990). Studies show that spontaneous functional play in children with autism is reduced compared to typical children (e.g., Jarrold et al., 1996; Lewis & Boucher, 1988; Ungerer & Sigman, 1981), but also compared to children with other conditions such as moderate learning difficulties (Jarrold et al., 1996). When functional play occurs, it appears to be less varied with more repetitions than novelty, consisting predominantly of single acts involving single objects (Boucher, 1977; Sigman & Ungerer, 1984; Williams, Reddy, & Costall, 2001). Hence, elaborated functional play that involves several objects in integrated chains of actions is less likely to be observed with these children (e.g., Williams et al., 2001). Although children with autism show a reduction in spontaneous functional play with multiple objects, they show no impairment compared with controls when provided with cues, either in terms of specific instructions (e.g., Give the dolly a drink of juice) or open prompts (e.g., What can you do with these?) (Charman & Baron-Cohen, 1997; Jarrold et al., 1996). Since children with autism are able to carry out elaborated functional play under cued circumstances, but show difficulties doing so spontaneously, it has been suggested that the difficulty relates to the ability to generate actions and to produce available skills (Jarrold et al., 1996). A potential outcome of such a deficit could be a predominance of repetitive responding over novelty and variability (Jarrold, 1997). Others have suggested that the very tendency to persevere interferes with the production of novel play responses (e.g., Lewis & Boucher, 1988). …