A Parent-Assisted Early Childhood Environmental Language Intervention Program

Abstract

Five children, aged 3 years 5 months to 4 years 11 months, who were speaking only in single word utterances and who exhibited a wide discrepancy between their language comprehension and production, were placed in a 12 week parent-assisted environmental language intervention program using a sensorimotor approach to language training. Word classes combined in eight semantic-grammatical rules were used to facilitate the child's pairing words already in his lexicon. At the end of the training period, all five children were using two word constructions in at least four of the eight rule classes sampled.