Transforming Personalized Speech: Bridging the Worlds of Home, School, and Clinic for the Preschooler with Language Delays

Abstract

Teachers and speech and language therapists worked with language-delayed and language-disordered preschoolers in a program to remediate communication problems (Haas, 1993). Despite these efforts, the children failed to demonstrate generalization of learned communicative strategies across settings. Only when professionals recognized and accepted the established communicative signs of the child's home were they able to collaborate with the mothers in transforming and creating new communication patterns that met the child's needs in a variety of settings and contexts.