NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A short, highly structured parent-provided language intervention program can normalize language development in young children who show signs of delays in speaking, a German study shows.
Dr. Anke Buschmann and colleagues from the University of Heidelberg randomly assigned 58 children with "expressive language delay" and their mothers to an intervention group or to a 12-month waiting group. The average age of the children was 2 years.
Mothers in the intervention group participated in the 3-month Heidelberg Parent-based Language Intervention (HPLI), which consists of seven 2-hour sessions and one 3-hour session in which parents are introduced to child-oriented techniques to get the child talking. Sharing picture books is one of the main topics of the program.
All of the children were reassessed after 6 and 12 months. Ultimately, 47 children were included in the analysis.
According to the researchers, at the age of 3, 18 children (75 percent) in the intervention group showed normal expressive language abilities compared with just 10 children (43.5 percent) in the waiting group.
At follow up, only two children (8.3 percent) in the intervention group met the criteria for specific language impairment, compared with six children (26.1 percent) in the waiting group.
The results "show that the HPLI is an effective and cost saving approach in providing support for children with specific expressive language delay," Buschmann and colleagues conclude.
"The parent program intervention appears to equip parents with ongoing skills, such as encouraging sharing books with their infants, and this may explain why the benefits appear to continue for at least a year after recruitment into the trial," Dr. Anne E. O'Hare, of the University of Edinburgh, UK, notes in a commentary on the study.
"This is very encouraging as the benefits of intervention in language impairments can appear to 'wash out' over time, which is not unexpected if the intervention stops," she notes. "If the benefits continued, then we could speculate that there would be potential benefits to literacy as well as spoken language."
SOURCE: Archives of Disease in Childhood, February 2009.
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Date last updated: 17 February 2009 |