Parent training of early language facilitation skills: parent and child outcomes from a large-scale effectiveness study in a diverse clinical population

ABSTRACT

This study examined the effectiveness of parent-led early language facilitation training via the Hanen® It Takes Two To Talk® (ITTT) (Pepper & Weitzman [2004]. It takes two to talk: A practical guide for parents of children with language delays. The Hanen Centre.) programme, within a large linguistically and demographically diverse community sample of early language-delayed children. Measures of expressive vocabulary, mean length of utterance (M3LU), and parent–child interaction were taken at multiple time-points, with change benchmarked against growth-curves for typical language maturation where possible. Significant improvements were evident pre–post intervention on all outcome measures regardless of linguistic or demographic diversity. Results indicated that gains in expressive vocabulary and M3LU were significantly greater than those predicted from age-matched typically developing children over the same time-period; M3LU in early language-delayed children was expedited to within estimated normal limits based on age. Gains in parent–child interaction were maintained at 3 months post-ITTT. These results point to the effectiveness of early language facilitation training in promoting expressive language and lasting improvements in parent–child interaction skills when implemented at scale within a demographically and linguistically diverse clinical referral group.

KEYWORDS:

• Early language delay
• parent training
• expressive language
• parent-child interaction

Acknowledgment

The authors thank participating Speech-language Pathology Services of SWSLHD and SLHD who collected all of the data and provided the treatment, and the families who participated. We also thank PCHRU particularly Lynn Kemp, for research support at the inception of the project and early data collection, Sieu Khuu and Andrew Baillie for helpful advice, and the Hanen Steering committees.

Notes

1 Children may have spoken culturally specific non-English words, or words in another language that have no English equivalent, which were not captured by the MCDI. In this case, this measure would have underestimated the expressive vocabulary of bi/multilingual children.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.