Promoting Early Engagement and Relationships through Speech (PEERS)

Children with language delays tend to be excluded from the peer social networks in early intervention and early childhood special education (ECSE) classrooms, and have fewer interactions and friendships than typically developing children (Chen et al., 2020b; Chen, Lin, Justice, & Sawyer, 2017). This has long term effects on several areas including their language development and school liking. PEERS seeks to disrupt these trends and foster language development for children with language delays through a peer-mediated intervention, where children complete intervention activities with the support of their teacher. PEERS uses state of the art sensing technologies, embedded systems comprised of both hardware and software, to collect continuous proximity and language data on all children in the classroom throughout their day. These data allow us to gain a more accurate and holistic picture of children’s experiences and to investigate the effects of this peer-mediated intervention both at the individual child level and in the broader classroom social network.