FACILITATING PRELINGUISTIC COMMUNICATION-SKILLS IN YOUNG-CHILDREN WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DELAY .2. SYSTEMATIC REPLICATION AND EXTENSION

Four children with mental retardation were studied in the context of a multiple baseline across subjects design. Staff members used a modifi ed version of the milieu teaching method to facilitate intentional req uesting. The results replicated the finding that a modified version of milieu teaching was effective in facilitating the use of intentional requesting by children with developmental delays in an intervention co ntext (Warren, Yoder, Gazdag, Kim, & Jones, 1993). This study also ext ended the Warren et al. (1993) work by (a) documenting that increased intentional requesting generalized to sessions with the children's mot hers, (b) demonstrating that mothers who were naive to the purposes of the study were more likely to linguistically map their children's pre linguistic communication after the intervention than before the treatm ent, and (c) that mothers and teachers who were naive to the purposes of the study linguistically mapped the children's intentional communic ation more than the children's preintentional communication. We discus s implications of these results for early intervention, the transactio nal theory of development, and the importance of the distinction betwe en intentional versus preintentional communication.