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Purpose: The authors sought to determine whether a program of 5 weekly doses of milieu communication teaching (MCT) would yield improvements in children's communication and word use compared with a once-weekly delivery of the same treatment. Method: Sixty-four children with intellectual and communication delay were randomly assigned to receive 60-min sessions of MCT either 1 time or 5 times per week over a 9-month treatment. Growth curves were fit to data collected at 5 points before, during, and after the MCT was delivered. Results: With groups collapsed, significant growth across the experimental period was observed on all measures, but this was not associated unconditionally with treatment intensity. Children who played with 9 or more objects during a standard play assessment, an empirically identified cut-point,benefited more from the high- than from the low-intensity treatment on lexical measures (Hedges's "g" range = 0.49 to 0.65). Conclusions: More MCT is not always better for all children. Clinicians can expect that increasing the frequency of MCT sessions will yield moderate enhancement of outcomes if the child has high interest in objects. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

Purpose: Our purpose was to test the competing sources of input (CSI) hypothesis by evaluating an intervention based on its principles. This hypothesis proposes that children's use of main verbs without tense is the result of their treating certain sentence types in the input (e.g., Was she laughing?) as models for declaratives (e.g., She laughing). Method: Twenty preschoolers with specific language impairment were randomly assigned to receive either a CSIbased intervention or a more traditional intervention that lacked the novel CSI features. The auxiliary is and the thirdperson singular suffix -s were directly treated over a 16-week period. Past tense -ed was monitored as a control. Results: The CSI-based group exhibited greater improvements in use of is than did the traditional group (d = 1.31), providing strong support for the CSI hypothesis. There were no significant between-groups differences in the production of the third-person singular suffix -s or the control (-ed), however. Conclusions: The group differences in the effects on the 2 treated morphemes may be due to differences in their distribution in interrogatives and declaratives (e.g., Is he hiding/He is hiding vs. Does he hide/He hides). Refinements in the intervention could address this issue and lead to more general effects across morphemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The authors sought to determine whether a program of 5 weekly doses of milieu communication teaching (MCT) would yield improvements in children's communication and word use compared with a once-weekly delivery of the same treatment. Method: Sixty-four children with intellectual and communication delay were randomly assigned to receive 60-min sessions of MCT either 1 time or 5 times per week over a 9-month treatment. Growth curves were fit to data collected at 5 points before, during, and after the MCT was delivered. Results: With groups collapsed, significant growth across the experimental period was observed on all measures, but this was not associated unconditionally with treatment intensity. Children who played with 9 or more objects during a standard play assessment, an empirically identified cut-point, benefited more from the high- than from the low-intensity treatment on lexical measures (Hedges's g range = .49 to .65). Conclusions: More MCT is not always better for all children. Clinicians can expect that increasing the frequency of MCT sessions will yield moderate enhancement of outcomes if the child has high interest in objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]