Language of Children With Disabilities to Peers at Play: Impact of Ecology

Play is a significant aspect of preschool curricula. We report two studies that examine the effects of play-related variables: length of free play, type of language instructional approach, degree of structure of free play, and amount of teacher involvement in communication with peers. For each study, we target three dependent variables: rate of utterances, vocabulary diversity, and mean length of utterance. In the first study, neither vocabulary diversity nor language complexity differed between the first and second halves of free playtime, regardless of instructional approach. There was a small but significant decrease in the rate of utterances to peers in the second half of the play period with children in the direct language classroom. In the second study, children increased talking with peers and vocabulary diversity when the teacher structured the play situation but did not participate. Taken together, these two studies suggest that some teacher-provided structure may maximize the peer language interaction of young children with disabilities.