Effectiveness of Social Stories in Children with Semantic Pragmatic Disorder

Abstract

Semantic pragmatic disorder is a term used to describe the communicative behavior of children who presented traits such as pathological talkativeness, deficient access to vocabulary and discourse comprehension, atypical choice of terms and inappropriate conversational skills (Rapin and Allen 1983). There are very few studies assessing the efficacy of social stories in childhood language disorders. The present study aimed at examining the efficacy of social stories for children semantic pragmatic disorder. Method: A single subject design was implemented on two subjects and was followed in three phases:  Phase I: A baseline of non-desirable behaviors. Phase II: Behaviors immediately post therapy. Phase III: Follow-up rating. Result and discussion: Use of social stories was found to be very effective in decreasing the non-desirable behaviors by 20% to 100% in both the subjects. Follow up evaluation after three months showed that, the improvement was maintained even after termination of therapy sessions. Parents and teachers of the subjects were happy and satisfied with the improvement. Shannon and Matthew (2005) also reported that the disruptive behavior decreased to a great extent when the story was paired with prompting.  Copyright © www.iiste.org

Keywords: Semantic pragmatic disorder, social stories.