Book Reviews

KENNETH R. BZOCH and RICHARD LEAGUE. AssessingLanguage Skills in Infancy: a handbook for themultidimensional analysis of emergent language.Florida: Tree of Life Press, 1972, pp, 54, $9.

It is almost a truism now to state that the earlier thedetection of any defect in the developing child thebetter the chance of remediation, of remission ofsymptoms and of minimizing the systemic effects ofinitial handicaps. Despite this, little emphasis hasbeen placed on devising instruments which could beused to measure emergent and progressive growth inthe most human of all our attributes - that oflanguage.

The authors of the Receptive-Expressive EmergentLanguage Scale for the measurement of languageskills in infancy present us with an objective instru­ment which can be used easily by nurses, paediatric­ians, social workers or speech pathologists, in shortby those who are more likely to come in contact withinfants than teachers, educational psychologists orothers trained to use tests for assessment. The scaleis designed to be applied from birth to the age of threeyears, using the parent as informant with or withoutdirect observation of the child and is designed as anaid in differentiating between children with normallanguage development and those with problems oforganic or emotional origin.

As a result of the increased attention directedtowards the effects of environmental deprivation onearly language development there is a growing bodyof evidence that the first three years of life are criticalin determining future linguistic and social competency.

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This scale can help in distinguishing between theeffects of low level stimulation and the learningdifficulties stemming from pathology, without theneed for an elaborate professional training on thepart of the administrator. The scoring is simple, thetime taken for administration is less than fifteenminutes. This in effect means that an early warningsystem can be established at relatively low cost whichis always a factor to be taken into consideration inthe delivery of services to a total population.

The manual deals with theoretical and practicalconsiderations more or less subscribing to Chomskyand Lenneberg's thesis that experience itself is notsufficient to explain the growth of Ianguage; however,along with this emphasis on biological factors, therole of experience, interaction with others andlanguage environment are also important in producingdifferences in verbal behaviours. Receptive languageor decoding skills, it points out, are integrallyassociated with biological structures, the centralnervous system and maturation, while expressivelanguage or encoding skills are developed by thelanguage environment and experience. This is thetheoretical basis for the differential diagnosticfeatures of the scale.

Taken as a whole the handbook and scale wouldconstitute an excellent teaching instrument forstudents, providing both experience and deeperunderstanding of early development - as well ofcourse as fulfilling its primary purpose of assistingin the diagnosis of early defects.

JOHN McKENNA (DUBLIN)