A protocol for assessing early communication of young children with autism and other developmental disabilities

The purposes of this article are (a) to describe a structured protocol for assessing request, reject, and repair behavior of young children with autism spectrum disorders and other developmental disabilities and (b) to highlight the importance of assessing these communicative behaviors. These three basic building blocks for social encounters, permitting the "speaker" to influence others in desired ways. Concepts of operant psychology, such as response class, functional equivalence, response competition, and response efficiency, are invoked to provide a conceptual framework for the assessment. To illustrate how the structured protocol can be implemented and the types of findings resulting from the assessment, an actual case study is presented with the data on requesting and rejecting for five young children with autism.