Immersive Communication Intervention for Speaking and Non-speaking Children with Intellectual Disabilities

Abstract

The current study demonstrates the effectiveness of an intervention that addresses both home care and day care for children with intellectual disabilities while also taking the large individual differences between the children into account. The KLINc Studio intervention was designed to improve the language development, communication skills, and emergent literacy of 10 children with complex communication needs. The focus of the anchor-based intervention program was on the stimulation of vocabulary learning via the incorporation of AAC into the learning environment in the most natural manner possible. While all of the children showed significant progress across the intervention period of 2 years, the group of speaking children showed greater development in the domains of receptive language and productive syntax than the group of non-speaking children. For heterogeneous groups of children with disabilities, the use of a combined intervention such as that described here appears to be promising.

Keywords:

• Preschool children
• Intervention
• Language development
• Developmental disabilities

Notes

1 ClassroomSuite is a registered trademark of IntelliTools, Novato CA. www.intellitools.com

2 PCI was calculated using the formula PCI = (developmental gain / time in intervention) / (pretest developmental age / pretest chronological age)

3 Cohen's d was calculated using the formula, d = 2t/√df (cf., Dunst, Hamby, & Trivette, 2004).