Some perspectives on intervention strategies for persons with developmental disorders

We present a view of language that crosses modal considerations (e.g., speech vs. augmentative systems) and places language within an interaction framework. We emphasize the need to consider normal social, cognitive, and linguistic development in selecting program guidelines for developmentally delayed persons. We address the child's linguistic code not as a set of phonetic, syntactic, and semantic features that can be trained in isolation, but as a means by which he can exercise the various pragmatic uses of communication. In effect, our interest has thus expanded from the child alone to the child as one member of a communicating dyad. Programming in the areas of mother's verbal input, expanding children's language skills, training in augmentative systems--all reflect an overriding objective of optimizing the language-user's ability to successfully participate in interactions with other persons in his/her environment.