During their preschool years, children engage in a variety of activities that promote early literacy including shared book reading with their parents or caregivers. There is ample empirical evidence with typical populations confirming the importance of these shared home book reading practices in enhancing young children's emergent literacy skills that is, understanding what books and stories are about. Although literacy is not considered a core impairment associated with autism, approximately 30 - 50% of autistic school-aged children struggle to read. This project is investigating the effectiveness of parental shared book reading intervention for optimising parent-child book reading behaviours and the emergent literacy skills of autistic preschool-aged children, with a focus on: (a) achieving an empirically validated intervention resource targeting adapted parent-child shared book reading for autistic preschool-aged children; (b) validation of a clinical checklist for measuring change in parent-child book reading practices for autistic children. This checklist was specifically designed based on the current evidence with typically developing populations and is undergoing inter-rater reliability checks.
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Cooperative Research Centre for Living with Autism
Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database (AFD)
