Eighty-five percent of a child’s brain growth occurs during the first three years of age (Bruner, Floyd, & Copeman, 2005). It is important that children with a developmental delay such as a language disorder be seen early to take advantage of the brain maturation. Early childhood intervention programs provide professional services to parents and children in naturalistic environments to increase the child’s communication using a variety of methods. In this investigation, the methods used were a combination of prelinguistic milieu teaching (PMT) and responsive interaction (RI), to determine the effects of a parent-training program on the parent’s verbal responses to the expressions of the child’s communicative intent, and determine if this program influenced the child’s language development. Results indicated that with an educationally rich environment, parent education, and coaching, the mother (JD) was able to increase her verbal responses to her child’s (TC) communicative intents. At baseline, JD’s verbal response rate of improvement was 0x, meaning there was no improvement in her verbal responses over these three session. When treatment was implemented, JD’s rate of improvement was 5.6x, indicating she began increasing her verbal responses after the treatment was introduced. At the maintenance phase, JD demonstrated another rate of improvement of 1.5x over these three sessions indicating that JD was able to maintain what she had learned and continued to improve. Absolute level of change between adjacent conditions and percent of nonoverlapping data (PND) indicated that from baseline to treatment, JD improved 5percentile points in absolute level of change with a PND of 75%. From treatment to maintenance, there was a 2-percentile point improvement in the absolute level of change with a PND of 33%. The child (TC) was also able to increase her receptive and expressive standard scores on the Developmental Assessment of Young Children 2nd edition in pre and post testing. TC’s standard scores in pre and post testing were greater than 22 points in receptive language (25 points), expressive language (33 points), and overall communication (26 points).
Keywords: prelinguistic milieu teaching, responsive interaction, early intervention, language, brain, developmental delay, communicative intents, normal development
