Parent-child dyadic interaction following a parent-mediated intervention in autistic children: a pre-post comparison study

Objectives This study aimed to understand the impact of the parent-mediated intervention on the types and functions of verbal utterances and pragmatic acts during parent-child dyadic interaction in autistic children.Methods The Interrupted Time Series Design was used in the present study. Parent-child dyadic interaction of four parents and their autistic children, enrolled in the group intervention program, was video recorded before intervention and at fixed intervals of one month for three months. Free play, shared book reading, distraction task, and dressing activity were analyzed and coded for types of utterances, discourse functions, and pragmatic functions.Results In the verbal types of utterance, increased use of interrogative utterances in shared book reading tasks and imperative sentences during free play were observed post-intervention. In discourse function analysis, definite differences were found in the proportion of initiation to the child’s response in free play. Among the pragmatic functions, differences were observed for questions in shared book reading tasks, descriptives in distraction tasks, and behavioral directives in free play tasks.Conclusions This small-scale exploratory study suggests that parent-mediated intervention may positively impact parent-child interaction in autistic children, potentially enhancing their communication skills. These findings warrant further investigation with larger samples.