Summary A methodology for recording and quantifying children's imaginative doll play was evaluated with a group of 10 normal children, aged 18–42 months and a group of 9 ESNS children, aged 57–103 months. With both groups there was high inter‐rater reliability and the measures used to quantify the play showed an expected positive correlation with Developmental Age. Furthermore the measures were sensitive to changes in the play brought about by different play materials and experimenter modelled doll play.

Summary Language facilitation schemes for the Mentally Handicapped have been designed mainly for use by therapists or teachers and they have tended to ignore the contribution which parents inevitably make to their child's development of language. However in this study, the parents were solely responsible for carrying out the language learning activities at home. They were given guidance on the choice of suitable learning objectives and games to play and. where necessary, their teaching methods were modified. The result demonstrated that parents were effective in teaching their child to identify and name objects and to structure two‐word sentences. It is argued that a “parent‐centred” approach not only makes more effective use of professional resources but that it may overcome the generalisation problems encountered by previous approaches.

No abstract