EFFECTIVENESS OF HOME-BASED EARLY INTERVENTION ON THE LANGUAGE-DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN OF MOTHERS WITH MENTAL-RETARDATION

The authors evaluated the effects of a home-based parent training prog ram for mothers with mental retardation on the language development of their children who were at risk for language delay. The participants, 28 mothers labelled mentally retarded with children under 28 months o f age, initially showed significantly fewer positive mother-child inte ractions and child vocalizations and verbalizations than did a compari son group of 38 families with children of similar age whose mothers we re not mentally retarded. The 28 mothers with low IQ were then matched on child entry age and randomly assigned to either an interaction tra ining or attention-control group (this group received training in safe ty and emergency skills unrelated to interactions). Interaction traini ng consisted of verbal instruction, modelling, feedback, and tangible reinforcement. After training, the training group scores were no longe r lower than those of the comparison group of mothers without mental r etardation and were also significantly higher than the scores of the a ttention-control group on all maternal positive interactions, child vo calizations, verbalizations, and language and social domains of the Ba yley Scales of Infant Development. Speech emerged significantly sooner in the training group as compared to the control group. The training group parents and children maintained improvements up to 82 weeks foll owing training, and the attention-control group, when subsequently tra ined, replicated the original training group results. Thus, home-based parent training increased Positive maternal interactions of mothers w ith mental retardation, which facilitated language development in thei r young children.