Language intervention for a child at the one-word stage should be most strongly influenced by the child's

• A. Motor skills
• B. Cognitive skills
• C. Syntactic skills
• D. Articulation skills

Answer: (B)

In the one-word stage, what shapes language learning most is the child’s cognitive ability to form symbolic connections between words and meanings. A single word often stands for a broader concept or event, so success hinges on understanding categories, object relations, and how things fit together in the child’s experience. Therefore, language intervention should build on and expand the child’s conceptual knowledge and their capacity to map words to those concepts. This means using meaningful, concrete associations, shared attention, and activities that link words to real objects and actions the child already understands.

Motor skills and articulation affect how clearly a word is spoken, but they don’t determine what the child is able to learn at this stage. Syntactic skills aren’t central yet, since the child is not using multiword combinations. The emphasis should be on enriching the child’s conceptual understanding and symbol-to-meaning mappings.