In search of a language intervention lexicon

An analysis of the syntactic, semantic and phonological features of a corpus of therapy words drawn from recent publications dealing with remedial language instruction was performed to determine whether these words would in theory support full grammatical acquisition. Percentage of occurrence data were compared with distributional statistics for adult (Berger, 1967a) and child (Weir, 1962) usage. The results suggested a bias in favor of concrete words referring to everyday objects around the home, nouns, verbs and adjectives, and morphemes of simple syllable and sound structure. In general the words analyzed appeared more suitable for children under 3 years of age than for older children. Of the factors guiding the clinician's selection of therapy words, native speaker intuition for distributional characteristics of the language was regarded as the major factor of judgment.