Naturalistic Interventions

Naturalistic interventions are those that teach skills in informal or natural settings rather than a setting designed for instruction. Within naturalistic interventions are specific treatments that emerged from two different theoretical perspectives: behavioral and developmental social-pragmatic (DSP) perspective (Ingersoll, B., Meyer, K., Bonter, N., Jelinek, S., 2012). These interventions use direct prompting and reinforcement within natural contexts to teach specific social communication skills. Numerous studies support the behavioral intervention effectiveness not only for social communication skills but teaching language, imitation and joint attention. Developmental social- pragmatic interventions are largely based on the social-pragmatic model of language acquisition with the focus being the adult’s responsiveness to the child and establishing conversational turns between the child and adult.
The primary difference between these two naturalistic intervention approaches is the degree to which the adult uses prompting to elicit specific child behaviors and strategies used to encourage adult responsiveness. Even with these differences there are a number of similarities between naturalistic behavioral approach and DSP approach in terms of their implementation. First, the intervention is conducted with meaningful activities in a natural environment, such as play and daily routines. Second is that teaching materials and activities (i.e. toys and games) and teaching follows the child’s lead. Lastly natural reinforcement is provided for the child’s