Abstract
At two years of age, nearly 13% of children in the United States have delays that would likely make them eligible for Early Intervention Program (EI) services (Rosenberg, Zhang, & Robinson, 2008). The proposed study seeks to examine whether the quality of written and spoken communication between parents and EI specialists is related to the quality of parent-child interactions during the delivery of such services. Quality of communication will be broken down into communication understandability, turn-taking, and the use of feedback and constructive language within conversations. Participants in this study will be limited to children under the age of three who are about to receive early intervention services for a speech delay, their parents and their early intervention service providers. The quality of parent-child interactions will be measured at the time of EI enrollment, prior to the start of services, and at six-month intervals for the duration of service delivery, using the Communication Play Protocol. It is hypothesized that effective methods of communication between the early intervention specialist and the parent will be related to higher quality interactions between the parents and their child.