Testing the effects of a pilot listening comprehension and vocabulary intervention for individuals with autism

•Many school-age children with ASD experience reading comprehension difficulties.•Investigated the effects of a 17–18 week listening comprehension intervention.•Participants grew in narrative retell, vocabulary, and listening comprehension.•Participants who received intervention showed higher narrative retell abilities.•Results suggest storybook-based intervention useful for children with ASD. Many school-age children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience difficulties with reading comprehension, yet few studies have examined intervention practices to support their early reading comprehension development. The current study used a small randomly assigned treatment control design (N = 12) to investigate the preliminary effects of a listening comprehension intervention on narrative retell, vocabulary, and listening comprehension skills for students with ASD. Children who received the intervention grew significantly on proximal measures of these skills. Significant group differences were noted at post-test on narrative retell ability. Although preliminary, these findings suggest that storybook-based interventions that target the oral language and social-cognitive underpinnings of comprehension development may be successful for school-age children with ASD.