Discussion
In the present study, staf members of an inpatient treatment facility in the Netherlands for school-aged children with ASD were taught to create opportunities for questionasking through staf training in PRT. Eleven of the 14 staf members created signiicantly more opportunities during intervention, indicating that staf training in PRT is efective for this purpose. However, generalization of creating opportunities to group situations was limited. Post-intervention and follow-up data demonstrated that most staf members maintained their skills over time. Furthermore, 8 of the 14 children initiated signiicantly more questions as a result of intervention. However, only a minority of the children maintained these skills over time. Generalization of child-initiated questions to group situations and collateral changes in language, pragmatic and adaptive skills and maladaptive behaviors did not occur.
The present study conirms indings of Huskens et al. (2012) indicating that staf can be taught to create opportunities for question-asking using PRT. Furthermore, this study adds to the growing evidence base supporting the use of PRT to improve question-asking in school-aged children with ASD (e.g., Dogget et al. 2013; Huskens et al. 2012; Robinson 2011). Until now, studies targeting questionasking focused on the acquisition of questions within only one communicative function (e.g., Betz et al. 2010; Dogget et al. 2013). The present study extends these studies by showing that children with ASD can acquire multiple questions with various communicative functions in the context of natural daily activities.
