The Study of the Effect of Audio-Visual Social Stories and Pragmatic Exercises on Improving (Non) verbal Communication Skills in Children with Autism

Autism spectrum disorder has always been associated with pragmatic language disorder. The present study aims to investigate the effect of audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises on improving (non)verbal communication skills in children with autism. It is a clinical trial with a pretest-posttest design. Subjects were selected by convenience sampling method which included 19 children aged 7 to 9 years old with autism spectrum disorder (level 1: requiring support). They received an intervention program organized in 18 individual sessions of 45 to 60 minutes. The findings of the study revealed that utilized audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises improved pragmatic level in children with autism spectrum disorder. In other words, it had a positive effect (p< 0.05) on the subscales of pragmatic skills in the Bishop Communication Checklist Questionnaire (1998). According to the results, it was shown that audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises improved (non)verbal communication skills in children with autism.