The purpose of this study was to determine if incidental language intervention with preschool language-delayed children increased the frequency of verbal and gestural speech acts. Subjects were four preverbal and four verbal children with mental retardation. The verbal subjects were selected to be peer language models for the preverbal subjects during a six-week language intervention programme based on incidental teaching. Nine speech acts were inspected for distributional changes between baseline and post-testing. The verbal preschool subjects appear to have facilitated an increase in communicative intentions by their preverbal peers based on a significant increase in frequency and distribution of the nine speech acts. |
