A review of past work shows convincingly that subnormal children with
severe language deficiencies should make substantial improvements
through a behavioural language programme, especially if it is designed on
functional rather than developmental principles. The paper describes one
such programme carried out with nine children by their teacher under
normal classroom conditions. The progress of Nicola is selected for
detailed exposition, demonstrating how she moved over four school terms
from largely two-word utterances to a repertoire of well-developed
syntactic structures which she generalized to a number of non-training
settings both within and outside the classroom.
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