Language is integrally involved in all stages of the learning process. Children who have a language disability are therefore likely to have difficulty with their schooling. The Centre for Language and Hearing Impaired Children was established to provide these children with an optimal start to their education and to maximize the impact of early intervention. The aim of this retrospective study was to obtain follow-up information about the pupils who attended this language-rich nursery school environment, and to discover if their progress reflected significant long-term improvements in their education. The study design involved both quantitative aspects, for which it became necessary to create an educational outcome scoring system in order to objectively assess children’s outcomes, and descriptive components to understand the children’s progress. The data collection involved two phases, where the initial data provided the basic demographics of 94 children who attended the Centre, and the second stage considered information obtained in the follow-up interviews with 32 families that could be traced. The latter data showed that, in spite of previously reported improvements while at the Centre, significant disabilities persisted in 56.25 % of the children, where they were unable to reach mainstream education. In addition, there were significant numbers (81.25%) that attended or passed through remedial/special education during their formal school career, reinforcing the need for supportive, therapeutic forms of education for children with language impairments.

Blissymbolics is a semantically-based graphic language which was originally developed as universal channel of communication to promote world peace. Instead, this logical and unambiguous symbol system has been adopted as a communication-enhancement system for pre-reading non-speaking children, and it is now ranked as the most comprehensive and effective graphic system used within augmentative communication. Over the years, a number of multi-functional programmes designed to manipulate microcomputer- based assembly of Blissymbols have been developed. Although some of these applications have become rather popular, none of them is based on a mechanism which provides their users with a cognitive access to the stored symbol vocabulary. The present research was initiated and devised with an underlying goal to gain an insight into some of the most potent characteristics of Blissymbolics, and then, with the backing of the findings, offer a microcomputer-based interface featuring a cognitive technique designed to facilitate retrieval, manipulation, teaching and learning of Blissymbols.