Publications and Presentations

Purpose: Effective early intervention (EI) services hinge on a partnership between speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and caregivers. Caregivers play a pivotal role in this partnership, as they must learn language facilitation strategies from SLPs and then implement these strategies with their children. Unfortunately, caregiver progress has often been overlooked, in both research and practice. The purpose of this clinical focus article is to underscore the importance of monitoring caregiver progress in EI and highlight practical data collection methods to do so.

Method: This clinical focus article reviews the value of collecting caregiver data at baseline, during EI sessions, and over the course of a caregiver-implemented intervention. A fictional clinical scenario is used to illustrate how these methods can be applied. In this scenario, an EI SLP works with a caregiver to set goals, teaches the caregiver language facilitation strategies using the See and Say Sequence, and measures progress using various types of caregiver data.

Conclusions: Collecting caregiver data can be a feasible and useful practice in EI. Caregiver data can guide SLPs in setting caregiver and child goals, in promoting caregiver practice during EI sessions, and in monitoring progress over time. Furthermore, it has the potential to increase caregiver engagement and build caregiver confidence in the EI process.

Purpose: This proof of concept study assessed the feasibility of a novel approach to teaching parents naturalistic language facilitation strategies in a single session. We investigated whether parents could learn to use the See and Say Sequence, which integrated responsive and language modeling strategies and measured the impacts that this intervention had on features of their input.

Method: Fourteen parent–child dyads participated in the study. Children ranged from 15 to 23 months of age and produced between three and 135 words. Five parents had concerns about their children's rate of language development. Parents were taught the See and Say Sequence during a brief single session (M = 18.98 min, SD = 2.65 min) using the Teach–Model–Coach–Review instructional process. We analyzed parents' use of the three See and Say Sequence components, total number of utterances, and mean turn length, as well as responsive and linguistic features of parent input before and after the brief intervention.

Results: Following intervention, parents significantly increased their use of the three See and Say Sequence components and decreased their total number of utterances and mean turn length. In addition, the use of the See and Say Sequence components substantially altered the overall composition of parent input.

Conclusions: The results of this preliminary study demonstrate the feasibility of the See and Say Sequence in teaching responsive and language modeling strategies in a single session. We discuss the potential use and future evaluation of the See and Say Sequence as an option for early intervention service delivery.