Home environments of 10-month-old infants selected by the WILSTAAR screen for pre-language difficulties

The Ward Infant Language Screening Test, Assessment, Acceleration and Remediation (WILSTAAR) comprises a programme for identifying and helping 8-10-month-old infants showing early signs of language and communication difficulty. The study addresses one of the queries raised by critics of the programme by providing evidence about the backgrounds and home environments of infants who fail the WILSTAAR screening assessment.

Thirty 10-month-old infants who failed the screen ('at-risk' infants) and 30 gender- and age-matched infants who passed the screen ('not-at-risk' infants) were visited at home by a trained observer who collected information about the infants' physical and social environment and families' demographic features.

Parents of both groups were well educated, in stable relationships, and had no evidence of social or economic disadvantage. Measures of ambient sound level and television exposure did not support the hypothesis that the at-risk infants' environments involved high levels of noise. However, observations of spontaneous behaviour and a standardized Mother-Infant Play Task identified low amounts of social interaction in at-risk cases. During the play task, mothers of at-risk infants spent twice as much time without interacting with their infants. At-risk infants babbled one-third less than not-at-risk infants during 150-min observations of spontaneous behaviour.

The findings point to deficiencies in social interaction and communication, involving both infant and parental contributions, as maintaining the infants' difficulties at this age. The core of the WILSTAAR intervention, of encouraging social communication between parents and infants, is not complex and does not need to be confined to at-risk cases. How this is best accomplished in the general community, and whether it should be included in national schemes such as Sure Start in the UK, are important topics for practitioners and policy-makers.