Intervention Effects of Music Therapy on Social Communication and Attention in Children with Autism

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_22How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Children with autism; music therapy; attention; social communication; case study; multimodal perception

Abstract

This study aims to examine the practical effects of music therapy on improving social communication skills and attention in the population of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The study employed a case study design. Baseline data were established through naturalistic observations in the preliminary phase, and changes in sustained attention, duration of focus, and eye contact were continuously recorded during the intervention period. A 7-week music therapy intervention was conducted with two children with moderate autism, and the effectiveness was evaluated using the Autism Treatment Effectiveness Checklist (ATEC), parent interviews, and behavioral observation records. The results indicate that music therapy effectively improves the subjects’ verbal communication frequency, social initiative, and the joint attention (JA) levels.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Hua Shao
AU  - Nannan Ou
AU  - Zengran Yang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/07
TI  - Intervention Effects of Music Therapy on Social Communication and Attention in Children with Autism
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 12th International Conference on Digital Humanities and Frontiers in Social Sciences (DHFSS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 193
EP  - 201
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_22
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_22
ID  - Shao2026
ER  -