Communicative Interactions of Mildly Delayed and Normally Developing Preschool Children

Abstract

The communicative interactions of mildly delayed and normally developing preschool children were recorded during free play as they interacted with children at different developmental levels in a mainstreamed program. Analyses of syntactic complexity, semantic diversity, functional aspects of speech, and the use of selected discourse devices indicated that mildly delayed children adjusted important characteristics of their speech in accordance with the cognitive and linguistic levels of their companions. Specifically, speech addressed to less developmentally advanced children was less complex, more diverse, and consisted of a greater proportion of behavior requests but contained proportionally fewer information requests or information statements. These adjustments appeared to be well suited for improving communicative effectiveness and were similar in magnitude and direction to those of normally developing children. In addition, both mildly delayed and normally developing groups were generally successful in obtaining responses to their behavior and information requests. The implications of these findings were discussed in relation to the communicative competence of young children and to early childhood mainstreaming.

Peer-Related Communicative Competence of Preschool Children

“…que ntl y (Guralnick & Paul-Brown, 1977, 1980, 1986. Overall, the se adjustments by 4-and 5-year-old nonhandicappe d c hildren parallel those that occur when nonhandicapped c hildre n's s peech to peers (or adults) is compared to interactions with younger childre n (e.g., Shatz & G e lman, 1973).…”

The Nature and Meaning of Social Integration for Young Children With Mild Developmental Delays in Inclusive Settings

“…Specifically, patterns of social separation are not as apparent as patterns of separation that occur with chronological age mates (Guralnick & Paul-Brown, 1986 ;Ispa & Matz, 1978) . Although matching on developmental level was not used in these studies of older children with delays, children with and without delays were certainly more similar to one another developmentally because there was a chronological age discrepancy .…”

Profiling teacher/child classroom communication: reliability of an alternating time sampling procedure

“…Child communication acts (a) Request (Creaghead and Margulies, 1982;Coggins and Carpenter, 1981;Cecconi, 1987;Guralnick and Paul-Brown, 1986;Goldstein and Ferrell, 1987) included behaviours in which the child indicated gesturally, vocally, or verbally that the teacher perform some action, deliver an object, or provide needed information. The requesting behaviour typically stopped when the teacher complied.…”

“…The requesting behaviour typically stopped when the teacher complied. (b) Labellcomment (Guralnick and Paul-Brown, 1986;Fey, 1984) involved a child-initiated utterance which was an attempt to spontaneously label an object or action. This was unrelated to any teacher requests for information, imitation, or action.…”