The main purpose was to study if children with intellectual disability interact or participate differently with preschool staff and peers compared to their non-disabled peers and how preschool teachers experience interaction and participation for children with intellectual disability and children with typical development. The results from study I show that there are more similarities than differences between the groups. There are no differences between the groups neither in engagement nor in what kind of material the children use or in what setting they play. The results indicated that children with intellectual disability interacted in the same contexts as their peers. Significant differences were found, indicating that the children with intellectual disabilities communicate less and especially less with peers. Children with intellectual disability are more often close to a teacher than children with typical development. Teacher’s communication indicates that teachers communicate and initiate more often to children with intellectual disabilities. Results from study II showed that the main difference between the target child and the control child expressed from the teachers was in the area communication. Participation differed in structured and unstructured situations even if it is not significant. The child with intellectual disability was less involved in his/her live situation in unstructured situations. The results from Individual Plans showed that goals and methods about communication were more common as a goal than interaction even if the teachers expressed that interaction is the child’s main problem.

The structure of graphic symbol utterance constructed by children with typical development and also children with little or no functional speech often differs considerably from spoken utterances. Whether the structure of graphic symbol utterances constructed by these two groups is influenced by similar factors is as yet unknown, as a systematic comparison between the two groups of children has not been conducted. This study aimed to investigate and compare the graphic symbol utterances arranged by children with little or no functional speech with those arranged by their typically developing peers when they were matched according to receptive language age. The utterances were analysed in terms of three variables, namely content, order and intelligibility. The results indicated that children with little or no functional speech do not differ significantly to children with typical development on tasks of graphic symbol utterance construction. The results also indicated that children with higher receptive language age start to use the spoken language word order as a model when arranging graphic symbol utterances more than children with lower receptive language age. The findings suggest that receptive language age plays a role in graphic symbol utterance constructions. The use of structures that do not follow spoken language may be explained by effects of the visual modality. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / gm2014 / Centre for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (CAAC) / unrestricted