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Copyright of American Journal on Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities is the property of American Association on Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose: To evaluate the longitudinal effects of a 6-month course of responsivity education (RE)/prelinguistic milieu teaching (PMT) for young children with developmental delay. Method: Fifty-one children, age 24-33 months, with fewer than 10 expressive words were randomly assigned to early-treatment/no-treatment groups. All treatment was added as a supplement to services that the children received in the community. Follow-up data were collected 6 and 12 months after the conclusion of the initial 6-month treatment/no-treatment conditions. Results: No effects of this treatment were detected 6 or 12 months after the conclusion of the initial treatment condition. Conclusions: M. E. Fey et al. (2006) reported that 6 months of RE/PMT led to a significant treatment effect in the use of intentional communication in 1 of 2 communication sampling contexts. This finding, combined with evidence from other studies, suggests that RE/PMT may be applied clinically at low intensity with the expectation of medium-sized effects on children's rate of intentional communication acts over the short term. The results of the present study, however, provide no evidence for the anticipated longer term benefits of this intervention. Further investigation of the approach at higher intensity levels and for longer periods of time is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) lag behind children with typical language (TL) in their grammatical development, despite equivalent early exposure to recasts in conversation (M. E. Fey, T. E. Krulik, D. F. Loeb, & K. Proctor-Williams, 1999) and the ability to learn from recasts in intervention as quickly as do children with TL (K. E. Nelson, S. Camarata, J. Welsh, L. Butovsky, & M. Camarata, 1996). This experiment tested whether this apparent paradox could be attributed to variations in the density of recasts in conversation versus intervention. Method: Thirteen children (7-8 years of age) with SLI and 13 language-similar children (5-6 years of age) with TL were exposed to 3 recast densities of novel irregular past tense verbs (none, conversation-like, intervention-like) over 5 sessions. Outcomes were based on spontaneous conversational productions and a post-test probe. Results: As predicted, at conversation-like densities, children with TL more accurately produced the target verbs they heard in recasts than in nonrecast models (d = 0.58), children with SLI showed no differences, and children with TL produced the verbs more accurately than did children with SLI (d = 0.54). Contrary to expectations, at higher intervention-like recast densities, the SLI group did not improve their accuracy, and the TL group performances were significantly poorer (d = 0.47). Conclusion: At conversational levels, recasts facilitated greater verb learning than models alone but only in the TL group. Increasing recast density to the modest levels in this brief intervention experiment did not benefit children with SLI and led to poorer learning for children with TL. To optimize learning, efficiency of recast distribution as well as rate must be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research over the past 50 years has yielded several promising approaches and many specific intervention techniques designed to enhance the communication and language development of young children with intellectual and developmental delays and disabilities. Yet virtually no systematic research has been conducted on the effects of different treatment intensities. We review how intervention intensity has been defined in the literature and propose a set of terms borrowed from medicine that are intended to capture the dynamic aspects of this concept as an aid to further investigation. On the basis of this approach, we propose four types of knowledge that can be generated through the systematic study of treatment intensity and discuss appropriate methods for investigating the effects of differential treatment intensities. We conclude with three recommendations for the field. © 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc. MRDD Research Reviews 2007;13:70–77. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined whether young children produce an emerging sound (/∫/) more accurately in a weak syllable if the syllable is trochaic (i.e., in a strong-weak syllable pattern) than if it is nontrochaic (i.e., either preceding a strong syllable or following another weak syllable). Eight typically-developing 28- to 32-month-old children who sometimes misproduced /∫/ imitated three-syllable nonwords with /∫/ as the onset in five syllable types: (a) word-medial stressed, (b) word-medial unstressed following a stressed syllable (i.e., trochaic), (c) word-initial nontrochaic, (d) word-medial nontrochaic, and (e) word-final nontrochaic. As predicted, /∫/ was more accurate in trochaic than nontrochaic contexts. Among nontrochaic contexts, /∫/ was more accurate in word-final position than in word-initial or word-medial positions. Production of /∫/ in word-final nontrochaic syllables was similar to that in word-medial trochaic syllables. Metrical structure and final syllable prominence together predicted which weak syllables are most likely to contain consonant errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study 538 children composed 1 oral and 1 written fictional story in both 2nd and 4th grades. Each child represented 1 of 4 diagnostic groups: typical language (TL), specific language impairment (SU), nonspecific language impairment (NU), or low nonverbal IQ (LNIQ). The stories of the TL group had more different words, more grammatical complexity, fewer errors, and more overall quality than either language-impaired group at either grade. Stories of the SU and LNIQ groups were consistently stronger than were those of the NLI group. Kindergarten children with language impairment (LI) whose standardized test performance suggested normalization by 2nd grade also appeared to have recovered in storytelling abilities by that point. By 4th grade, however, these children's stories were less like the children with TL and more like those of children with persistent LI than they had been in 2nd grade. Oral stories were better than written stories in both grades, although the greatest gains from 2nd to 4th grade were generally made on written stories. Girls told stronger stories than did boys at both grades, regardless of group placement. It is concluded that story composition tasks are educationally relevant and should play a significant role in the evaluation of children with developmental LI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the abilities of young children to identify and generalize new verbs from an indirect teaching context. Forty 4-year-olds were shown a story that presented the following manner-of-motion verbs: frolic, saunter, scurry, strut, and trudge. The experimental group ( N = 20) heard the label of each verb 13 times while viewing the story, whereas the control group ( N = 20) did not hear the verbs' labels. The performances of these two groups were compared to each other and to a group of adults ( N = 22) who did not view the story but presumably had prior knowledge of the verbs. The experimental group correctly identified the target verbs in their prototypical form significantly more often than the control group but less often than the adult group. Generalization measures were evaluated for the children in the experimental group who correctly identified more than half of the target verbs ( N = 6), their age-matched control group peers ( N = 9), and the adult group. The experimental subgroup and the adults correctly generalized the verb labels to actions in which unimportant motion features had been altered. However, unlike the adult group, the experimental subgroup responded inconsistently to generalization questions in which important movement features of the actions had been altered. These results suggest that, even in their initial representations of manner-of-motion verbs, young children are sensitive to the relative importance of the different movements that make up these actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a study that examined the reading outcomes of children with language impairments. Research method; Results and discussion on the study.

In intervention, children with specific language impairment (SLI) have been shown to develop productive use of morphemes in response to target-specific recasts at rates generally equivalent to younger, language-matched children with typical language development (TL). Our previous work demonstrated that in conversation, the overall recast rates produced by parents of children with SLI and those with TL are similar. Still, despite their apparently typical ability to use recast input in intervention and their equivalent environmental exposure to recasts, children with SLI continue to demonstrate grammatical delays in comparison to children with TL.The purpose of this study was to examine three possible resolutions to this paradox. We examined target-specific copula and article recast usage by 10 parents of children with SLI and 10 parents of younger language-matched children with TL, and we examined their children's productions of these same forms at three points across an 8-month period. The results provide strong support only for the third of the proposed hypotheses. Contrary to the predictions of the first hypothesis, a strong, positive relation was observed between the copula recasts used by parents of children with TL at Time 1 and their children's use of copulas 8 months later. On the other hand, correlations between recasts of articles by parents and later production of articles by their children were not statistically reliable. Contrary to the second hypothesis, parents of children with SLI and those with TL produced equivalent rates of article and copula recasts. The third hypothesis received support on two essential counts. First, although significant correlations were found between parental recasts of copulas and production of this form 8 months later for the children with TL, no such relations were observed for the group with SLI. Second, the rate of parental target-specific recasts was less than a quarter of the rate provided in the successful intervention of Camarata, Nelson, and Camarata (1994). We conclude that children with SLI can benefit substantially from the grammar-facilitating properties of recasts, but only when the recasts are presented at rates that are much greater than those available in typical conversations with young children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]