Facilitating Early Language Development with Milieu Intervention Procedures

The lexical, semantic, and pragmatic effects of milieu language intervention procedures implemented to teach basic lexicon and early relational semantic forms was investigated. The subjects were two young children with mild mental retardation in the early stages of productive language development. After a baseline period, the subjects received four training sessions weekly in a small group interactive play situation. Experimental control was demonstrated by within-subject multiple baseline designs across training targets. Generalization was measured along a variety of dimensions. Results indicated that one subject expanded his basic lexicon and began to generatively produce both action-object and agent-action combinations in nonobligatory conversational situations as requests for objects/actions and as declaratives with different adults. The other subject began to generatively produce both agent-action-object and adjective-noun combinations in nonobligatory conversational situations as requests and declaratives with different adults and in different settings. Both subjects began to respond correctly to probe questions for each target form. The results further support the use of milieu language training procedures to enhance the acquisition and generative use of basic lexicon and relational semantic forms. The results also suggest that systematic adult commenting and the child's spontaneous imitation may further facilitate the effects of milieu language teaching.