Teacher-Implemented Prelinguistic Communication Intervention

Abstract

The purpose of this case study was to explore the efficacy of a prelinguistic intervention implemented by a classroom teacher in the ongoing daily activities of one special education preschool classroom. The project used a multiple baseline across behavior design for both child and teacher. The participants were a 3-year-old boy with severe communication and cognitive delays and his special education classroom teacher. The teacher implemented a prelinguistic intervention designed to increase the child's frequency and clarity of communication. The strategies used by the teacher were environmental arrangement, following the child's lead, imitation of vocalizations and gestures, modeling of vocalizations and gestures, and prompting for communication. The results indicated that the teacher was able to implement the intervention and showed increases in all the intervention strategies. The child increased his rate of intentional communication, eye contact, vocalizations with consonants, and conventional gestures. Two unanticipated results occurred. First, the child increased his use of symbolic communication, primarily of signs. He also developed symbolic play skills that were not targeted in the intervention. Although the results should be viewed with caution, they warrant further investigation of the use of prelinguistic intervention with young children with communication delays and disorders.