Help your child to acquire language naturally!
Within weeks of starting Intensive Interaction, my 7-year-old verbal son began to use emotive expressions such as “oops!” “oh dear!” "wow!" and “oh no!” for the first time in his life. He also began to create his very own language - we could tell because we had never before heard him make toddler-like mistakes in his otherwise perfect scripts (lifted mostly from videos). My question is, if we didn’t have language goals for him to work towards, then what was it about Intensive Interaction that was helping him develop language? How might it help anyone to acquire language?
Human beings have been attempting to describe language for centuries: We have compiled huge dictionaries and extensive and complicated grammars. Yet, despite our efforts, our current understanding and descriptions of language remain inadequate and superficial (Chomsky, 2000). Typically developing infants, Chomsky (2000) argues, acquire these complex language systems effortlessly due to an innate language learning capacity. Behavioural approaches, such as the ones we used with my son prior to discovering Intensive Interaction are not modelled on natural language acquisition. Rather they break language down - based on these inadequate and superficial descriptions – into small teaching steps, meaning they teach something other than the language we all use. Furthermore, learning in this way is not motivating - learners are often kept on task with rewards.
So how is language learnt in typical development? Crucially, communication learning comes first and happens via the natural synchronicity of the parent-infant type interactions that Intensive Interaction is based on (Rogoff, 1990). Behavioural approaches taught my son language in a communication void; the result was – he became verbal but not communicative. Intensive Interaction provided an environment in which he was motivated to become a communicator so he naturally began to acquire some of the language that he needed to express his own inner thoughts and feelings.
In typical development, a special register for talking to infants known as ‘motherese’ is thought to aid language development because infants enjoy listening to it and tuning into (working out) its patterns and rules (Maye et al., 2002). In Intensive Interaction we consciously and sensitively tune into our learners to ensure we use language that is acceptable, motivating and engaging for them, i.e. we use a form of motherese that is optimal for communication and language learning for the particular learner we are interacting with.
Joint attention also contributes towards typical language
development and is created by adults tuning into and commenting on the child’s interests (Rogoff, 1990). Thus children first learn to name objects and emotions that are important to them, making language learning in this way highly motivating. We know that adults find tuning into individuals who have autism more difficult due to their atypical body movements and non-verbal communications, making joint attention outside an approach like Intensive Interaction difficult. (Edey et al., 2016).
It would appear that, by replicating some of nature’s ways of teaching language learning and communication in our Intensive Interaction sessions, we begin to create an ideal and much needed environment for our learners, in which both their communication and language might blossom more naturally.
References:
Chomsky, N. (2000) New horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge. CUP.
Edey, R., Cook, J., Brewer, R., Johnson, M., Bird, G. & Press, C. (2016) ‘Interaction takes two: Typical adults exhibit mind-blindness towards those with ASD,’ Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
Maye, J. Werker, JF. & Gerken, L. (2002) ‘Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination.’ International Journal of Cognitive Science. 82, p.101-111
Rogoff, B. (1990) Apprenticesh ip in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. Oxford.
