INFORMATION CARRYING WORDS
An instruction or command can contain lots of words, but a child only needs to understand
the IMPORTANT words in order to follow that instruction. These ‘important’ words are
called INFORMATION CARRYING WORDS.
It is possible to find out exactly how many of the information carrying words (ICW) the
child understands in a given sentence.
 For example:

Equipment: Teddy

Instruction: “Show me Teddy” [ 0 Information Carrying Words]

In this situation, the child does not actually need to understand ANY of the words in
the instruction, but will use the situational cues to follow the instruction.
 BUT, if you add another object and therefore another choice, the child has to
understand the word ‘Teddy’ in order to carry out the instruction correctly.

Equipment: Teddy, Dolly

Instruction: “Show me Teddy” [1 ICW]
 Adding yet more objects will increase the number of Information Carrying Words that
the child must understand:

Equipment: Teddy, Dolly, cup, biscuit

Instruction:
“Give Teddy a drink” [2 ICW]
“Give Dolly a biscuit” [2 ICW]
 Further objects or actions can be added to make the instructions more complicated, so
that they contain 3 or more Information Carrying Words:

Equipment: Teddy, Dolly, big car, little car, big train, little train

Instruction:
October 2012
“Give the big train to Teddy” [3 ICW]
“Give the little car to Dolly” [3 ICW]
RL Intro 1