Language Intervention With Young Children

Researchers can afford the luxury of waiting until the data are in to take a stance on the many difficult issues regarding language intervention with children.

Clinicians cannot. Fey’s book provides the all too rare combination of a careful, cautious scientific attitude with a willingness to offer his own suggestions on clinical issues that cannot await solid research support – Who should receive treatment? How are goals most effectively selected for individual children? What works to facilitate goals once they are selected? and so on.

This very readable book focuses on intervention with young children who are beginning to talk and make word combinations and does not deal explicitly with either the prelinguistic child or the school-aged child. However, many of the principles Fey discusses do have application on all levels of language disorders.

Unlike most books on early language intervention, Fey has avoided discussing normal development except for areas that have generally been ignored by others, such as peer interaction. His choice is a welcome one, since we know far less about effective intervention than we do about normal language development.

Fey’s book begins with the role of theory in intervention. Operant learning theory, social learning theory, the interactionist viewpoint (essentially that of Bloom & Lahey, 1978), and transformational generative grammar are over-viewed, and implications for treatment are discussed.