Design of a language stimulation program for children suffering abuse

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Abstract

This article proposes an intervention program, designed specifically for children in residential care who suffer institutionalized abuse, aimed at stimulating their use of language. The objective of the intervention procedure is to improve children's linguistic competence and their socio-affective development, as well as to enable parents to communicate and interact effectively with their children. Several studies have focused on the difficulties children suffering from abuse have with verbal expression and other areas of development. The research stresses the need to set up intervention programs that can improve the linguistic and social competence of children suffering from abuse. With such children, there is a fundamental need to develop a competence that will encourage their adaptive social skills, which are basic skills for interacting socially and which encourage the pragmatic language function, a skill needed for relating to adults and solving interpersonal problems.

Research Highlights

► This study proposes an intervention program for children in residential care. ► Our objective is to improve these children’s linguistic competence. ► The program has been designed so as to be attractive to the children. ► We stress the integration of this program with the curricular project of the schools. ► The program allows us to approach normal language patterns easy to generalize.

Introduction

The right linguistic and cognitive stimulation is fundamental to a person's integral development and its neglect can seriously impair this development. A great part of any child's activity in their first year of life is communicative and social. The communicative interaction that they establish with the adults who are important to them is essential for language learning, as it provides the necessary tools to develop formal language.

During the first years of life, thanks to the stimulation provided by the adults who take care of them, children develop, as they grow, the ability to handle objects and discover their properties; they discover that adults are the agents who influence both people and things and they learn to communicate with us. Children are prepared for learning to speak with only a little linguistic stimulation; yet, to learn to speak correctly at the right time, the stimulation should be suitable and continuous. If the stimulation fits a child's stage of development and capacities, and there is a positive atmosphere, then they will learn the language while interacting with the people around them (Echols and Marti, 2004, Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2004, Polonko, 2006, Straus and Kantor, 2005, Thelen and Bates, 2003).

Thus, interaction with the familiar surroundings and with the principal figure of affection is fundamental, as it reinforces and redirects the child's spontaneous use of language, little by little leading to a correct use. However, the use of language necessarily implies the realization that other people are human beings who can think, with beliefs and intentions that should be taken into account in order to establish communication and the way it will be carried out. Children have to give form to the content they wish to transmit, be able to name objects and concepts and later combine words so as to achieve a complete linguistic development.

A lack of stimulation during the first years, very frequent in children suffering abuse, results in the impairment of their language development and also affects their social development. When their home does not provide the minimum psychological conditions for a child's correct development (lack of physical care, affection and communication; hostility, intolerance, rejection, neglect, etc.), this will affect language development (Hammond, Nebel-Gould, & Brooks, 1989). As pointed out by various authors, the lack of stimulation in children suffering abuse results in an impairment of their development in general and, in particular, of language acquisition (Allen and Wasserman, 1985, Augoustinos, 1987, Cicchetti and Carlson, 1989, Dowsett et al., 2008, Fernández and Fuertes, 2000, Moreno and García-Baamonde, 2009, Moreno et al., 2008, Moreno et al., 2010, Moreno et al., 2006, Nair et al., 2003, Rycus and Hughes, 1998, Skuse, 1992, Sylvestre and Mérette, 2010).

Sylvestre and Mérette (2010) point out that serious neglect is harmful to children's language development even from the pre-language stage, and that it is extremely harmful to a child's future linguistic development.

Nevertheless, a lack of verbal stimulation alone, without other privations, does not produce impairment in the child's language development; it is the absence of affection during the first years of infancy (Chaimay et al., 2006, Prathanee et al., 2007, Tamis-LeMonda et al., 1998), the communicative style of the carers and the interference or lack of response to the child's communication (Raver and Leadbeater, 1998, Stanton-Chapman et al., 2002, Tamis-LeMonda and Bornstein, 2002) that can stunt the child's development. In general, linguistic disorders appear when there is an associated lack of affection and children have not properly formed affective links with those around them (Rutter & Lord, 1986). Laible and Thompson (1998) state that, given the wealth of emotional experiences provided by the family, it is only logical that a lack of quality in the child–parent interaction will influence the socio-emotional and communicative development of the children (Koponen, Kalland, & Autti-Rämö, 2009).

To be precise, it is in disorganized attachment, in which the sensitivity towards the child's needs is distorted and is most frequent in cases of child abuse, that the interaction with the child will not lead to a correct interpretation of the intended and communicative meaning of the child's actions. Lyons-Ruth, Bronfman, and Parsons (1999), showed that mothers of children with a disorganized attachment make more mistakes in their affective communication (contradictory messages and lack of response or inadequate response to the child's signals).

Some studies, in which the linguistic repercussions in those suffering from some kind of child abuse were analyzed, found that all forms of child abuse have a considerable effect on the acquisition and development of language, the greatest limitations being in victims of abuse and emotional neglect (Moreno, 2003, Moreno, 2005, Moreno, García-Baamonde and Rabazo, 2007). Verbal comprehension may be impaired (Fox et al., 1988, Moreno, Rabazo and García-Baamonde, 2007), yet the effect on the expressive aspect is always more important: poor vocabulary, wrong articulation (Culp et al., 1991), deficient structuring of phrases and even difficulties to understand complex syntax (Gersten, Coster, Schneider-Rosen, Carlson, & Cicchetti, 1986), scarce internal language to direct actions, limited use of the language, poor results in operations of arithmetic reasoning related to receptive and expressive language (Manor, Shalev, Joseph, & Gross-Tsur, 2001), etc. These limitations, in many cases, are linked to the presence of a deficit in the cognitive, social and psychological development (Bates, Tomasello, & Slobin, 2005). Similarly, the difficulties depend on the severity of the abuse, the child's age, the persistence of the situation of neglect, the moment in which it is detected, the start of the intervention and the co-morbidity with other disorders.

Recently, two investigations carried out in Spain have brought about an advance in the study of linguistic competence in victims of child abuse (Moreno et al., 2009, Moreno et al., 2010). These studies have found a low level of linguistic competence in the various language skills, the main difficulties being more in pragmatics and morphology than in syntax and semantics. In the same line, the following studies should be mentioned: Beeghly and Cicchetti, 1995, Coster et al., 1989, Eigsti and Cicchetti, 2004. The way children interpret different situations and the way they respond are marked by the experiences they live through, as also is the way they express their feelings and emotions. This leads to difficulties in correctly interpreting a message's intention.

The results of these investigations have allowed us to design, given the lack of such programs, a language stimulation program aimed at victims of child abuse, focusing on the main observed difficulties.

Section snippets

Development of the intervention program

The program presented here is designed to be carried out, over twenty sessions, with children aged between 5 and 12 in residential care centers.

The intervention has the following objectives: firstly, to improve children's understanding of language and their ability to express themselves through a linguistic stimulation program, following the patterns of the normal language acquisition process and through processes of imitation and modeling; secondly, the need to encourage the children's

Discussion and conclusions

Residential care is never considered as a definitive alternative to the family. The temporal nature of residential care implies that the children must have an intervention scheme to guide their stay in the institution. Each individual child should be evaluated according to their personal circumstances in such a way that the treatment they are given is appropriate and provides them with the right kind of development.

The residential centers have evolved from a welfare regime to a more educational

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