From acquisition theories to intervention strategies: An experiment with mentally handicapped children

Abstract

An intervention programme, to facilitate children's use of Agent + Action + Object sentences and based around specially made toys, was designed to encompass recent thinking on children's natural language acquisition, in particular the importance of providing a linguistically responsive environment. Two groups of children were involved. One group only played with the toys but the other received sentence models in response to their play actions. Rather surprisingly both groups showed improvements on post‐training assessments and these were maintained four weeks later. It is argued that children must be capable of understanding and identifying relationships among people, objects and events before they can use sentence structuring rules generatively. In future, language intervention programmes should focus more on developing such understanding and rather less on eliciting speech.

Developing linguistic awareness: A theoretically based approach to phonological disorders

“…The question of how the child acquires language is an extremely complex one. Whilst it is very relevant for the therapist to be aware of these issues when planning intervention programmes (Martin, McConkey & Martin, 1984), it is not a discussion which it is appropriate to enter here. Rather the essential factor is to consider the theories of learning, or development, offered and evaluate each one in the light of the therapeutic intervention (Howell & Dean, 1983).…”