Contributions from: I. Mavis, D. Erbas.
Abstract
In Turkey, it is observed that children whose cognitive, motor and/or language developments are slower face with difficulties in diagnosis especially when they are recognised with communication delay. Especially, unless there is organic or inorganic disorder, no early intervention can be provided easily. This partly results from the lack of sufficient assessment / evaluation tools, education medium and management, and speech-language therapists whose contributions are valuable to the mentioned discipline. Knowing that the development of early communicative behaviours may imply later developments in cognitive, social and language abilities, searching children's effectiveness in communication in a given context and studying language and communication for early assessments has gained importance recently.
The primary aim of this research is to observe, describe and assess early communicative behaviours of 0-36 month children by functional- communicative approach. Within that mentioned aim, variables that assessed communicative behaviours during parental speech between children with normal language development and children with language/communication delay have been determined. These variables were studied in three groups as "regulating behaviours, expressing social interaction, expressing joint attention". To transcribe the interaction between children and mothers -recorded by tapes and videotapes-, child speech has been analysed by gestures/gaze, vocalisation, gesture & vocalisation and utterances and listed under the variables mentioned before. The research has been designed with qualitative-descriptive methods.
According to the observation results of 8 normal developers of 13-21
month old interacting with their mothers or adults;
a) we have observed
that a 13 month old child can express gestures quite often and support these
gestures with vocalisation.
b) utterance use recognised first at 15 month old is getting more in number by the 21th. Month and gesture /vocalisation use is decreasing.
c) Almost all children of this group have been observed to start and continue communication for some time.
According to the observation results of 9 delayed children (24-34 month
old) interacting with their mothers or adults;
a) we have observed that 4
children of 24 months use gestures quite often, only two of them demonstrate
vocalization, and only one has the ability to start and continue communication
even for a short period.
b) It is obvious that utterance use start from the 30th month. The vocabulary used by the children is observed to be less than the normal developers. In general, the children whose communicative behaviours observed appeared to develop much slower than the normal ones.
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