Preventing Speech and Language Disorders in Children With Classic Galactosemia

The Babble Boot Camp is an experimental study to investigate whether earliest and proactive activities and routines can positively influence the speech and language development of children who were diagnosed with classic galactosemia at birth. A speech-language pathologists implements the intervention by teaching parents to foster and expand earliest signals of communication, prespeech activities such as coo and babble, vocabulary growth, sentence complexity, and use of language to communicate. Examples are intentional eye contact, reinforcing babble with rewarding play activities, and repeating a child's rudimentary sentence with slight expansions to scaffold longer sentences.