Early shared reading experiences have been shown to benefit normally hearing children. It has been hypothesized that hearing parents of deaf or hard-of-hearing children may be uncomfortable or may lack adequate skills to engage in shared reading activities. A factor that may contribute to the widely cited reading difficulties seen in the majority of deaf children is a lack of early linguistic and literacy exposure that come from early shared reading experiences with an adult who is competent in the language of the child. A single-subject-design research study is described, which uses technology along with parent training in an attempt to enhance the shared reading experiences in this population of children. The results indicate that our technology-enhanced shared reading led to a greater time spent in shared reading activities and sign vocabulary acquisition. In addition, analysis of the shared reading has identified the specific aspects of the technology and the components of the parent training that were used most often.

Selecting the appropriate language of intervention for bilingual children with language impairment is difficult, especially for bilingual children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) as their families are often encouraged by professionals to select one language only for communication. The limited evidence supports the use of bilingual language interventions when working with bilingual children with ASD. The current study sought to expand this limited work by presenting preliminary data of the effects of a bilingual and monolingual treatment condition on the language skills of two bilingual children with ASD (ages 3 and 5) using an alternating treatment, single-subject design. The two treatment conditions, a monolingual English condition and a bilingual English/Spanish condition, were alternated across 14 treatment sessions. Both participants improved in each condition. The treatment conditions were highly effective for one participant and minimally effective for the other participant. Within each participant, effect sizes were similar across the two treatment conditions. There were differences in the maintenance patterns of the two participants. These results support the available evidence that bilingual treatments do not have negative effects on bilingual children with ASD.

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