Clinician-delivered early intervention based on principles of cross-situational statistical learning (CSSL) for late talking children has shown some promise. This study sought to explore whether parents could be trained to deliver this intervention protocol with fidelity, and whether parents found the intervention to be acceptable. The mothers of four English-speaking children aged 18-30 months who scored <10th centile for expressive vocabulary were recruited to participate in an eight-week group training program. Parents were taught principles of cross-situational statistical learning and asked to perform two 30-minute home treatment sessions each week (16 sessions total), during which they provided auditory bombardment of selected target words in full sentences at high dose number and syntactic variability, using a range of physical exemplars. Treatment fidelity was examined through home diaries, and two video-taped sessions per family. Acceptability was measured via pre- and post-treatment questionnaire. One parent discontinued the study after the second group training session with no reasons provided. The remaining three parents all completed 15/16 group training sessions and reported high rates of home treatment (>87% of sessions). Two parents learnt to implement the intervention as per the required target dose number by the first fidelity session (Weeks 2/3), and the third parent was very close to meeting target dose number by the second fidelity session (Weeks 7/8). Three out of the four participants found the protocol acceptable. In conclusion, parents can be successfully trained to deliver an intervention based on cross situational statistical learning. Further investigation is required to identify if such an intervention has effects on child language development.

1. In research, treatments based on cross-situational statistical learning can increase the expressive vocabulary of some children beyond the typical rates of language growth for late talking monolingual English speaking toddlers. 2. CSSL principles include clinicians speaking using a high dose of target words paired with varied physical exemplars using complete sentences which have syntactic variability. 3. Parents can be successfully trained in CSSL principles, and this can be achieved over quite a short time-frame.