This Italian prospective clinical study included an experimental group who participated in the It Takes Two to Talk® Program and a no-treatment control group. The study also included six monthly “reinforcement” intervention sessions following It Takes Two to Talk. All children had profound hearing loss, had cochlear implants, and belonged to Italian-speaking families.

Participants

• It Takes Two to Talk (experimental) group

  14 children (average age 26 months) and their parents. Some children had more than one parent participate in the intervention

• Control group

  14 children and their parents who received no treatment

Results & Key Findings

Participation in the It Takes Two to Talk Program resulted in significant gains in parent responsiveness

• Parents who participated in the It Takes Two to Talk Program showed significant gains in responsiveness to their child’s 
  communication via measures recorded using the Communication-Promoting Behaviours Checklist for Caregivers compared to parents in the control group.

Children with cochlear implants whose parents participated in the It Takes Two to Talk Program experienced significant and greater gains in expressive language outcomes compared with the control group

• Children in the It Takes Two to Talk group showed greater improvements in expressive language measures recorded using the Italian version of the MCDI compared to the control group.

  
  

  At three years post-intervention, children in the It Takes Two to Talk group showed greater language skills as measured by a battery of norm-referenced and/or standardized tests – including the Italian versions of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the Boston Naming Test – than their control-group peers.