The Daily Dozen: Strategies for Enhancing Social Communication of Infants with Language Delays

Approximately 228,000 children from birth to age 3 are affected by a disability. Developmental challenges may include severe, chronic disabilities that can begin at birth and last a lifetime. Delayed speech and language are the most common types of developmental delays among infants and toddlers. Many of these children are at risk for later language and literacy problems. To complicate matters, little research exists on the development and evaluation of prelinguistic teaching strategies for infants with developmental delays. However, some researchers have found that early infant intervention in social communication at the prelinguistic stage holds promise for young children's later language success. In this article, the authors describe a series of early language strategies that can help ease the strain of one-way communication with infants who might be slow to respond during social interactions. While these strategies are developmentally appropriate for all infants, they are especially critical when working with infants who have developmental delays. Infants with developmental delays may display several symptoms of delayed language development. Such symptoms include few vocalizations, communicative gestures, or spontaneous imitations and a reduced rate of nonverbal communication. These strategies--the authors call them the Daily Dozen--may help alleviate these potential problems.