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Purpose: Adapted ride-on cars offer an affordable mobility intervention that provides broader access to a child's environment. Such newfound independence is a unique opportunity to examine changes in environmental language and communicative participation as children acquire mobility. New technologies such as the Language Environmental Analysis (LENA) system hold promise for evaluating naturalistic language interactions but have not yet been applied to children with cerebral palsy with physical and/or communication impairments. This study sought to use LENA with a sample of children with cerebral palsy to determine the feasibility of monitoring environmental language patterns during longitudinal mobility intervention. Method: LENA's adult word counts, conversational turns, and child vocalizations were compared across three time points for participants aged 16-49 months with a range of communication skills (indexed by Communication Function Classification System Levels I-IV). Results: Feasibility was established with acceptable criterion validity during active drive time. Results had large effect sizes, likely diluted by sample size and heterogeneity. Conclusions: Limitations include small sample size, nonprescriptive use of powered mobility devices, and lack of control group. Future studies should incorporate these features to more closely examine communication patterns.

Preventative parent-coaching programs can improve early interaction quality, language skills, and academic outcomes for children experiencing economic adversity. Using a community-based participatory research framework, we piloted Duet, a preventative, parent-implemented, early language intervention. We assigned home visitors to provide Duet or standard-of-care services to 23 children (aged 1; 0-2; 3; 9 Duet, 14 control) and their parents. We used odds ratios to describe the likelihood of improvement. The Duet group had greater odds of improvement than the control group for parent developmental knowledge (moderate effect size), self-efficacy (moderate effect size), parent--child interaction (moderate effect size), and child's language (weak effect size). The preliminary Duet data are promising. Limitations included recruitment and retention in the community setting. Future research will explore Duet's efficacy, effectiveness, and scalability.