Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
The presence and effect of adult communication behaviors that reportedly facilitate children's verbal output were examined in clinician's and mothers' interaction with seven language-impaired children using a lag sequential analysis. Two language samples were collected from each child, one each by the clinician and mother of the child. Consecutive adult and child utterances were coded to identify adults' sharing of child's focus, child utterance length, adult utterance type, topic maintenance, lexical contingency, and time between utterances. Mothers were found to use facilitative communication behaviors more often than the children. Adults' ‘facilitative’ behaviors had limited effect on children's immediate output. Implications for assessing mothers' input to language-impaired children and eliciting language samples efficiently are discussed.