A therapeutic milieu for establishing and expanding communicative behaviors in psychotic children.

This study describes a clinical intervention program that was used to facilitate development of receptive and expressive language skills in a group of four psychotic children. A group format utilizing an interactive language development teaching procedure combined with a therapeutic milieu was shown to be effective in establishing and expanding communicative behaviors in psychotic children. Nine diagnostic measures were utilized to assess children's performance prior to therapy and at the end of three-month and six-month intervals. Results indicated substantial reduction of delayed and immediate echolalia, jargon, inappropriate stress, pitch, and intonation. Substantial improvement was noted in expressive syntactic and morphological functioning and in the children's ability to generate novel utterances about day-to-day experiences, family, and toys. Increases in children's concept of body image and ego functioning paralleled their improvement in receptive and expressive language development.