A Format for Selecting Vocabulary for the Nonspeaking Child

Abstract

A format was developed to help the parents, teachers, and others become sensitive to the specific vocabulary needs of the nonspeaking child. Out of this awareness came an ability to identify the existing words in the child's vocabulary pool. This pool became the source of words for later representation in the child's nonspeech lexicon and also served as a source for the adult to model communication in the child's symbol system. The opportunity for nonspeech language interaction and creative vocabulary selection was provided which more closely paralleled that which occurs in the normal development of speech as language symbols.