Does the child exhibit an understanding and/or use of the following verbal- social communication (discourse) skills?
• Attending: Does the child attend to the communicative partner? This is demonstrated by the child’s ability to secure the attention of the listener prior to communicating. Example: A verbal child with autism begins talking to his teacher who is across the classroom, not realizing that he needs to call or secure the teacher’s attention prior to communicating. • Conversational turn taking: The child can/cannot take part in communicative exchanges across several conversational turns as both speaker and listener. He asks contingent questions, allows the communicative partner to complete a conversational turn without interrupting, follows the communicative partner’s turn with an appropriate utterance, and allows the communicative partner to take a turn in the conversation. Example: Some verbal children with autism engage in one-sided conversations. They speak at length about a specific high interest topic and do not engage in actual conversational turn taking because they don’t allow anyon
