Contributions from: Leila Nunes
Abstract
Children who are blind and visually impaired are at risk for developmental delays, specially in language skills. Language delays for visually impaired children could be due to sensorial deprivation or failures on perception for relations between objects and events of the world. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of training mother of language delayed visual impairment child as raill interventionists. The mother, Marina, and her child, Mônica, participated as subject of this study. The mother is 28 years old and the child is 3 years old in the beginning of the study; they lived in a slum of Rio de Janeiro city. Mônica has a visual impairment (low vision) and she was assisted in a Rehabilitation Centre for blind and visually impaired persons, where the study was conducted. She request objects or help through gestures and vocalize few sounds, e.g. "a, a". An experimental multiple-baseline design was implemented across mothers behaviours. The study lasted 12 months, divided in 5 steps: Baseline, Training, Intervention, Generalization and Follow up. Consecutive sessions were conducted at the Rehabilitation Centre and at the subjects home. During the intervention, the mother was taught to use four raill techniques: Environmental Arrangement, Model, Mand-Model and Time delay. Conclusions drawn from the findings were that mother can be taught to correctly apply raill teaching model during naturalistic interactions with their child, and further, that as a result of the mother's teaching efforts, improvements may occur in a variety of child linguistic skills.
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