لخّصلي

For many children with intellectual disabilities (ID), their medical, physical, and behavioural problems are of principal priority for caregivers.New insights from brain research provide guidelines for such early interventions.

For many children with intellectual disabilities (ID), their medical, physical, and behavioural problems are of principal priority for caregivers. Little room is left for attention to language development and emergent literacy. Such children can nevertheless acquire complex communication skills and attain high levels of literacy when provided sufficient and appropriate support (Kaiser et al., 2001, Koppenhaver and Erickson, 2003). This lack of attention is quite worrisome, moreover, when it is recognized that most of the problem behaviour of such children stems from insufficient language and communication skills (Sigafoos et al., 2003, Wacker et al., 2002). Early interventions to stimulate the language, communication, and emergent literacy of children with ID and efforts to raise the awareness of caregivers with regard to the necessity of such stimulation might therefore be very beneficial (Erickson and Koppenhaver, 1995, Tannock et al., 1992). New insights from brain research provide guidelines for such early interventions. In the present research, the effectiveness of an early intervention which draws upon neurocognitive principles of language processing and language learning is evaluated