Picture Me Playing: Increasing Pretend Play Dialogue of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

This study examined the effectiveness of the Picture Me Playing intervention for increasing the play dialogue of preschool children with ASD during pretend play opportunities with typical peers. Picture Me Playing is a pictorially enhanced, script based intervention targeting character role play through a narrative vignette. A single-treatment counterbalanced design was utilized to contrast the performance of intervention and comparison groups, followed by within-subject analysis. Results indicated significant increases in play dialogue represented by both scripted and novel utterances. Results generalized to an unscripted play opportunity with novel toys.