Language Rehabilitation and Programmed Conditioning

Abstract

The following study was undertaken to test the effectiveness of a program of language rehabilitation that combined current knowledge about language development with established techniques of programmed conditioning. The subject was a five-year-old girl with a very reduced language system. or a five-month period, she was trained to produce sentences with structures that characterized the next level of development, based on what is known about stages of language acquisition. The sentences were presented through programmed conditioning. Language samples taken before and after training were compared; it was found that the second sample showed a marked gain in mean length of utterance and a large increase in the use and complexity of basic grammatical relations.

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