Involving parents in extending the language development of their young mentally handicapped children

Abstract

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.

The Effects of Focused Stimulation for Promoting Vocabulary in Young Children with Delays

“…Focused stimulation has also been used by parents of children at more advanced levels of language development to teach two-word phrases (Cheseldine & McConkey, 1979;McConkey, Jeffree & Hewson, 1979) and grammar (Fey et al, 1993). Unfortunately, the first t w o studies (i.e., Cheseldine & McConkey, 1979;McConkey et al, 1979) did not include untreated control groups and the effects of treatment on the children's language growth could not be separated from maturational growth.…”

“…Unfortunately, the first t w o studies (i.e., Cheseldine & McConkey, 1979;McConkey et al, 1979) did not include untreated control groups and the effects of treatment on the children's language growth could not be separated from maturational growth. In contrast, the study by Fey and his colleagues included a control group and provides preliminary support for the successful use of focused stimulation in parent training.…”

Comparing how mothers and teachers talk to children: is it different and does it matter?

“…The use of certain maternal questions has been associated with the child's development of the verb phrase (for example, Furrow and Nelson, 1986), and Wells (1981and Wells ( , 1985 reports on an association between (among other factors) the mother's use of directives and the child's language development. Despite these findings, however, mothers of MH children may be advised to reduce the proportions of directives and questions they use (McConkey, et al, 1979). In this study we will examine the adults' input for evidence of 'controlling' behaviour, compare their use with that reported for mothers of DN children, and also compare mothers' and teachers' use.…”

“…The extensive debate in the child language literature about the effect the maternal linguistic environment might have on the rate of language development in children raises issues for those concerned with mental handicap. Because mentally handicapped (MH) children are slow to develop language, assumptions have been made firstly about the relationship between this aspect of retardation and maternal input (Buium, Rynders and Turnure, 1974) and secondly about the possibility of enhancing MH children's language development by changing the mode of the maternal input (McConkey, Jeffree and Hewson, 1979). Studies have focused on examining the extent that maternal input to MH children varies from maternal input to younger, linguistically similar, developmentally normal (DN) children (for example, Buium, et al, 1974;Jones, 1977; O'Kelly Collard, 1978;Mitchell, 1980;Cardoso-Martins and Mervis, 1981).…”

Discourse-Based Language Intervention

“…Focused stimulation (Fey, 1986) is a pragmaticallybased language intervention approach for which some experimental support exists (Camarata & Nelson, 1992;Cheseldine & McConkey, 1979;Culatta & Horn, 1981, 1982Fey, Cleave, Long, & Hughes, 1993;Leonard et al, 1982;McConkey, Jeffree, & Hewson, 1979;Nelson, 1977; W i l l b r a n d , 1977). This procedure is characterized by intense modeling of a target linguistic structure by the clinician without requiring the child to respond to the clinician's input at anytime.…”