This article briefly addresses the potential detrimental impact of early language and communication impairments on a child's emotional and behavioral development, later educational achievement, and on the family's well-being. It focuses on children who fall along a continuum from a specific language delay to a more pervasive social-communicative impairment. Assessment is discussed from the perspective of profiling a young child's communication and symbolic abilities. Strategies for sampling communication and symbolic abilities in young children who are not yet talking or who are at early language stages are described. Emphasis is placed on involving the caregiver as an active participant interacting with the child, as an informant about the child's competence, and as a collaborator in consensus-building and decision-making based on shared observations and perceptions. The contribution of profiling to the early identification of a language impairment as well as to the design of an early intervention program is discussed and illustrated with two clinical vignettes.
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