The Effects of Parent-Implemented Enhanced Milieu Teaching on the Social Communication of Children Who Have Autism

This study examined the effects of training six parents to use Enhanced Milieu Teaching (EMT) with their preschool children with autism or pervasive development disabilities. A modified single subject design across the six families was used to assess the parents' acquisition and generalized use of the EMT strategies. The parents learned to use the naturalistic language intervention strategies during 24 individual training sessions in the clinic and generalized their use of the strategies to home interactions at the end of the intervention. Follow- up observations in the clinic and home observations six months after the intervention indicated that parents maintained their use of the newly-learned procedures throughout the follow-up period but at levels lower than those achieved during the clinic training. Positive effects were observed on the use of communication targets for all children and on the complexity and diversity of productive language for most children. Child effects generalized and maintained for four of six children and there was evidence of change on developmental assessments of language for five of six children. Parent satisfaction with the intervention procedures and child outcomes was high.