All four students showed increased story comprehension and engagement during adapted shared reading. Average percentage of session engaged was 87%-100% during adapted sessions, compared with 41%-52% during baseline. Average number of correct responses to story comprehension questions was 4.2-4.8 out of 6 during adapted sessions compared with 1.2-2 during baseline. Visual supports, tactile objects, and specific teaching strategies offer ways for minimally verbal students to meaningfully participate in literacy activities. Future research should investigate adapted shared reading activities implemented classroom-wide as well as joint engagement, language, and literacy outcomes after using such activities over time.

Early intervention in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can improve core and associated symptoms and facilitate skills that increase social opportunities. However, determining effective intervention success in this population, and the mechanisms that produce it, is currently restricted to observable behavior. The need of therapy assessment metrics beyond traditional behavioral criteria, led to the use of physiological signals for capturing childtherapist internal dynamics during an intervention session. Internal physiological states were measured through Electrodermal Activity (EDA) and modeled in relation to observed self-and co-regulatory behaviors. A common measure of EDA, Skin Conductance Response (SCR), was the primary signal of interest and assumed to form a non-homogeneous Poisson Process whose rate function is determined by observed regulatory behaviors. Through likelihood and residual goodness of fit analysis, statistical tests and classification tasks, our results indicate that SCR changes and observable behavior in child-therapist dyads are temporally associated and the estimated model parameters can be linked to the types of regulation stimuli.

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