A Brief Intervention to Teach Parents Naturalistic Language Facilitation Strategies

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Speech-Language Pathology
• Early Childhood Education

Background:

• Early language development is crucial for cognitive and social skills.
• Parental input significantly influences a child's language acquisition trajectory.
• Naturalistic language facilitation strategies empower parents to support their child's communication.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the feasibility of teaching parents the See and Say Sequence, a novel approach for naturalistic language facilitation.
• To investigate if parents can learn and implement responsive and language modeling strategies in a single session.
• To measure the impact of the See and Say Sequence intervention on parent's linguistic input.

Main Methods:

• A proof-of-concept study involving 14 parent-child dyads with children aged 15-23 months.
• Parents were taught the See and Say Sequence using the Teach-Model-Coach-Review process in a brief, single session.
• Parental language input was analyzed for specific strategy use, utterance features, and responsive/linguistic characteristics before and after the intervention.

Main Results:

• Parents demonstrated a significant increase in the use of the See and Say Sequence components post-intervention.
• Parents decreased their total number of utterances and mean turn length, indicating more responsive interaction.
• The intervention substantially altered the overall composition of parent input, enhancing language facilitation.

Conclusions:

• The See and Say Sequence is a feasible method for teaching naturalistic language facilitation strategies in a single session.
• This approach shows potential as an early intervention service delivery option for supporting language development.
• Further research is warranted to evaluate the long-term efficacy and broader application of the See and Say Sequence.