The Effectiveness of Cognitive Therapy method on Pragmatic Skills in Autistic Girls

Human growth is dependent on social interactions. As a significant part of the human entity, language plays a crucial role in this regard. Humans communicate through verbal and nonverbal languages. Conversational skills are the most important pragmatics skills, and children with autism spectrum disorder suffer from significant deficits in pragmatics, and because of this they face successive communication failures due to impaired pragmatic and conversational skills. Thus, developing treatment methods that focus on improving the conversational skills of these children is especially important. The present study aims at evaluating the function of pragmatic skills and the severity of this disorder in ۲۰ Persian speaking girls with autism and ۲۰ normal girls aged ۴-۱۰. Awareness of how this approach works and its effectiveness on improving language and social skills can be a guide for therapeutic protocols to improve the development of theory of mind in children with a variety of language disorders.Methods: This is a descriptive-analytical study. The subjects were ۴۰ girls assigned into two groups of girls with autism (N = ۲۰) and normal girls (N = ۲۰) based on random sampling. The instrument used in this study was the Children's Communication Checklist, ۲nd ed. to measure the pragmatic skills and the Childhood Autism Rating Scale–Second Edition (CARS-۲). All of these children were also evaluated by a child psychiatrist and a child neurologist and investigation was based on autism criteria and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, ۵th Edition (DSM-V). Eventually, the data were analyzed by independent t-test in R environment.Results: A significant difference was observed between autistic subjects and standard scores, i.e. there was a significant difference (p <۰.۰۵) between the mean and standard deviation scores of the subjects (p <۰.۰۵). In other words, there is a difference between the mean scores of pragmatic subscales in the Children's Communication Checklist, ۲nd ed. and the subjects' scores. The results also indicated that the subjects' language development improved gradually and during treatment. Conclusion: By and large, it can be concluded that Cognitive Model treatment method, can be effective in treating language disorder in children with autism.

Keywords:

Cognitive Therapy Method , Pragmatics , Autism