Background

Research has shown that there is a large gap between the speech and language skills of 40 – 50% of preschool children from poorer backgrounds compared to those who are wealthier. This affects the overall wellbeing and quality of life of these children throughout their lifetime.

To try and reduce this gap, SLTs have taken several treatment approaches which include:

• Teaching parents the best way to talk and interact with their children so that they can help them develop better speech and language skills in everyday situations.
• Training staff working with young children in early years settings how to create the best language learning opportunities for them.

Studies have looked at the effects of both of these approaches, but few studies have examined the effects when therapists work with parents and staff at the same time. In addition, there is a shortage of research studies carried out in the ‘real world’ where the treatment is given by practicing SLTs rather than a team of university-based researchers.

Why Happy Talk? …

We recently carried out a small scale ‘real world’ study on the pre/school ‘Happy Talk’ programme, a community-based programme in which SLTs work together with parents and preschool staff at the same time. The overall aim of the programme is to train parents and early years educators in creating language rich environments for their children and therefore maximise speech, language and communication learning opportunities.

We found that Happy Talk had a large positive effect on children’s understanding of language and a medium effect on their overall language skills, compared to children who didn’t receive the programme.

We also found ‘Happy Talk’ to be cost-effective.

Our current randomised control trial builds on this work by:

• Completing a much larger study where children’s allocation to the programme will be decided randomly and where we will look at costs and benefits on a larger scale
• Identifying key features that support successful application of the programme in the real world and incorporating these into future roll-outs
• Learning how to make Happy Talk work in a range of contexts

Project Aims

Our overall aim is evaluate ‘Happy Talk’ in a large-scale effectiveness study, (a randomized control trial) based on a sample of children from socially disadvantaged areas across Ireland.

 Within this we also aim to:

• Identify factors that have promoted social capital between caregivers, educators and SLTs in previous implementations of Happy Talk and incorporate these into the training of SLT interventionists, as well as informing future roll outs of the programme.
• Complete a concurrent process evaluation to examine how the successful delivery of the Happy Talk intervention is influenced by the implementation context and therefore what would need to be considered in its delivery across varied settings to ensure positive results.
• Conduct an economic evaluation in which we compare the costs and benefits of Happy Talk to standard preschool/school care.