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Purpose: In a previous article, we reported that beginning treatment for regular past tense "-ed" with certain types of verbs led to greater generalization in children with developmental language disorder than beginning treatment with other types of verbs. This article provides updated data from that study, including the addition of data from 3 children, results from naturalistic language samples, and data from a third time point. Method: Twenty 4- to 9-year-old children with developmental language disorder (10 per condition) were randomly assigned to receive language intervention in which the verbs used to teach regular past tense "-ed" were manipulated. Half received easy first intervention, beginning with highly frequent, telic, phonologically simple verbs, and half received hard first intervention, beginning with less frequent, atelic, and phonologically complex verbs. The design used a train-to-criterion approach, with children receiving up to 36 visits. Performance was assessed using elicited production probes and language samples before intervention, immediately following intervention and 6-8 weeks later. Results: Children in the hard first group showed greater gains on the use of regular past tense "-ed" in both structured probes (at immediate post only) and in language samples (at both immediate and delayed post). Gains attributable to therapy were not observed in untreated morphemes. Conclusions: This study suggests that the choice of therapy materials, with an eye on the role that treatment stimuli play in generalization, is important for treatment efficacy. Clinicians should consider early selection of atelic, lower-frequency, phonologically complex verbs when teaching children to use regular past tense "-ed". Further work expanding this to other morphemes and a larger population is needed to confirm this finding.

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 CSI-based intervention or a more traditional intervention that lacked the novel CSI features. The auxiliary "is" and the third-person 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 hide's'"). Refinements in the intervention could address this issue and lead to more general effects across morphemes.

We tested four predictions based on the assumption that optional infinitives can be attributed to properties of the input whereby children inappropriately extract non-finite subject-verb sequences (e.g. "the girl run") from larger input utterances (e.g. "Does the girl run?" "Let's watch the girl run"). Thirty children with specific language impairment (SLI) and thirty typically developing children heard novel and familiar verbs that appeared exclusively either in utterances containing non-finite subject-verb sequences or in simple sentences with the verb inflected for third person singular "-s." Subsequent testing showed strong input effects, especially for the SLI group. The results provide support for input-based factors as significant contributors not only to the optional infinitive period in typical development, but also to the especially protracted optional infinitive period seen in SLI.

In an earlier randomized clinical trial, daily communication and language therapy resulted in more favorable spoken vocabulary outcomes than weekly therapy sessions in a subgroup of initially nonverbal preschoolers with intellectual disabilities that included only children with Down syndrome (DS). In this reanalysis of the dataset involving only the participants with DS, we found that more therapy led to larger spoken vocabularies at posttreatment because it increased children's canonical syllabic communication and receptive vocabulary growth early in the treatment phase.

Purpose: The authors examined (a) whether dose frequency of milieu communication teaching (MCT) affects children's canonical syllabic communication and (b) whether the relation between early canonical syllabic communication and later spoken vocabulary is mediated by parental linguistic mapping in children with intellectual disabilities (ID). Method: The authors drew on extant data from a recent differential treatment intensity study in which 63 toddlers with ID were randomly assigned to receive either five 1-hr MCT sessions per week (i.e., daily treatment) or one 1-hr MCT session per week (i.e., weekly treatment) for 9 months. Children's early canonical syllabic communication was measured after 3 months of treatment, and later spoken vocabulary was measured at posttreatment. Midpoint parental linguistic mapping was measured after 6 months of treatment. Results: A moderate-sized effect in favor of daily treatment was observed on canonical syllabic communication. The significant relation between canonical syllabic communication and spoken vocabulary was partially mediated by linguistic mapping. Conclusions: These results suggest that canonical syllabic communication may elicit parental linguistic mapping, which may in turn support spoken vocabulary development in children with ID. More frequent early intervention boosted canonical syllabic communication, which may jump-start this transactional language-learning mechanism. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.

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 CSI-based intervention or a more traditional intervention that lacked the novel CSI features. The auxiliary is and the third-person 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., Children with specific language impairment (SLI) typically have a core of mild to severe deficits that affect their performance across linguistic components, including phonology, semantics, and pragmatics. Across languages, however, [...]

Purpose: This study examined sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI) in a manner designed to separate the contribution of cognitive capacity from the effects of syntactic structure. Method: Nineteen children with SLI, 19 typically developing children matched for age (TD-A), and 19 younger typically developing children (TD-Y) matched according to sentence comprehension test scores responded to sentence comprehension items that varied in either length or their demands on cognitive capacity, based on the nature of the foils competing with the target picture. Results: The TD-A children were accurate across all item types. The SLI and TD-Y groups were less accurate than the TD-A group on items with greater length and, especially, on items with the greatest demands on cognitive capacity. The types of errors were consistent with failure to retain details of the sentence apart from syntactic structure. Conclusions: The difficulty in the more demanding conditions seemed attributable to interference. Specifically, the children with SLI and the TD-Y children appeared to have difficulty retaining details of the target sentence when the information reflected in the foils closely resembled the information in the target sentence. (Contains 4 tables and 2 figures.)

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: To determine whether preschool-age children with cochlear implants have age-appropriate phonological awareness and print knowledge and to examine the relationships of these skills with related speech and language abilities. Method: The sample comprised 24 children with cochlear implants (CIs) and 23 peers with normal hearing (NH), ages 36 to 60 months. Children's print knowledge, phonological awareness, language, speech production, and speech perception abilities were assessed. Results: For phonological awareness, the CI group's mean score fell within one standard deviation of the Test of Preschool Early Literacy's (Lonigan, Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 2007) normative sample mean but was more than one standard deviation below the NH group mean. The CI group's performance did not differ significantly from that of the NH group for print knowledge. For the CI group, phonological awareness and print knowledge were significantly correlated with language, speech production, and speech perception. Together these predictor variables accounted for 34% of variance in the CI group's phonological awareness but no significant variance in their print knowledge. Conclusions: Children with CIs have the potential to develop age-appropriate early literacy skills by preschool age but are likely to lag behind their NH peers in phonological awareness. Intervention programs serving these children should target these skills with instruction and by facilitating speech and language development.

Purpose: In this systematic review, the peer-reviewed literature on the efficacy of interventions for school-age children with auditory processing disorder (APD) is critically evaluated. Method: Searches of 28 electronic databases yielded 25 studies for analysis. These studies were categorized by research phase (e.g., exploratory, efficacy) and ranked on a standard set of quality features related to methodology and reporting. Results: Some support exists for the claim that auditory and language interventions can improve auditory functioning in children with APD and those with primary spoken language disorder. There is little indication, however, that observed improvements are due to the auditory features of these programs. Similarly, evidence supporting the effects of these programs on spoken and written language functioning is limited. Conclusion: The evidence base is too small and weak to provide clear guidance to speech-language pathologists faced with treating children with diagnosed APD, but some cautious skepticism is warranted until the record of evidence is more complete. Clinicians who decide to use auditory interventions should be aware of the limitations in the evidence and take special care to monitor the spoken and written language status of their young clients.

Purpose: Fast ForWord-Language (FFW-L) is designed to enhance children's processing of auditory-verbal signals and, thus, their ability to learn language. As a preliminary evaluation of this claim, we examined the effects of a 5-week course of FFW-L as an adjuvant treatment with a subsequent 5-week conventional narrative-based language intervention (NBLI) that targeted narrative comprehension and production and grammatical output. Method: Twenty-three children 6-8 years of age with language impairments were assigned randomly to 1 of 3 intervention sequences: (a) FFW-L/NBLI, (b) NBLI/FFW-L, or (c) wait/NBLI. We predicted that after both treatment periods, the FFW-L/NBLI group would show greater gains on measures of narrative ability, conversational grammar, and nonword repetition than the other groups. Results: After the first 5-week study period, the intervention groups, taken together (i.e., FFW-L/NBLI and NBLI/FFW-L), significantly outperformed the no-treatment wait/NBLI group on 2 narrative measures. At the final test period, all 3 groups displayed significant time-related effects on measures of narrative ability, but there were no statistically significant between-groups effects of intervention sequence. Conclusions: This preliminary study provides no evidence to support the claim that FFW-L enhances children's response to a conventional language intervention.

Purpose: To evaluate the learning effects of a deductive language-teaching procedure when teaching a novel gender agreement verb inflection to children with language impairment. Method: Thirty-two 6-8-year-old children with language impairment were randomly assigned to either a deductive (N = 16) or an inductive (N = 16) treatment group. In the deductive treatment, the examiner presented a rule guiding the novel inflection to be learned as well as models of the inflection. In the inductive treatment, only models of the verb inflection were presented. Learning was assessed in 3 different production contexts during each of 4 treatment sessions. Results: Significantly more participants in the deductive group than the inductive group acquired the novel morpheme based on a teaching probe (10 vs. 3), generalization probe (10 vs. 3), and maintenance probe (7 vs. 2). Task performance was not significantly influenced by language ability or nonverbal intelligence. Conclusions: The deductive teaching procedure was found to be efficacious when teaching a novel grammatical inflection. However, this effect was limited because treatment gains varied across participants, testing contexts, and sessions. Future studies should continue to examine the efficacy of deductive procedures when integrated into traditional implicit approaches for children with language impairment. (Contains 3 tables and 3 figures.)

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.

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.

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.

Purpose: This paper is a personal reaction to Gillam and Gillam's treatise on evidence-based decision making in schools. This evaluation focuses principally on the costs and benefits of clinicians' search for external evidence, potential problems associated with efforts to grade that evidence, and the integration of this evidence with "internal" evidence related to specific children and their families, clinician preferences and experience, and the school setting. Method: Descriptive methods (that are not evidence-based) are used to evaluate critically Gillam and Gillam's proposals on the implementation of evidence-based practice (EBP) in schools. Conclusion: Early efforts to implement the plan for EBP illustrated by Gillam and Gillam are likely to be difficult, forcing clinicians to be flexible and patient. Nevertheless, if the plan is followed, it will result ultimately in improved speech-language pathology services in the schools and improved clinical research to support those services.

Purpose: To evaluate the efficacy of a 6-month course of responsivity education/prelinguistic milieu teaching (RE/PMT) for children with developmental delay and RE/PMT's effects on parenting stress in a randomized clinical trial. Method: Fifty-one children, age 24-33 months, with no more than 10 expressive words or signs, were randomly assigned to treatment/no-treatment groups. Thirteen children in each group had a diagnosis of Down syndrome. Results: In 1 of 2 multivariate comparisons, the RE/PMT group exhibited superior gains in communication compared with the no-treatment group. The treatment effect for overall use of intentional communication acts in the child-examiner context was significant (d = .68, 95% confidence interval = 0.12-1.24). There were no effects on child outcomes due to presence or absence of Down syndrome. RE/PMT led to modest increases in recoding of child acts by parents of children who did not have Down syndrome. There were no effects on parenting stress associated with the intervention or the presence or absence of Down syndrome. Conclusion: RE/PMT may be applied clinically with the expectation of medium-size effects on the child's rate of intentional communication acts after 6 months of intervention. The approach warrants further investigation with modifications, such as delivery at higher intensity levels. (Contains 7 tables and 2 figures.)

Pronominal referencing was evaluated in a sample of 569 children comprising four diagnostic subgroups: typical language (TL), specific language impairment (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), and typical language with low nonverbal IQ (LNIQ). Participants generated oral narratives in second grade and again in fourth grade. The narratives of the females in the TL group included a significantly higher rate of pronominal references than the narratives of both the males in the TL group and the females in the NLI group. A higher percentage of complete pronominal references was found in the TL group compared to the SLI group. These findings suggest that pronominal referencing measures are not sensitive enough to differentiate school-aged children with typical language development from those with language impairment. Learning outcomes: The reader will: (1) become familiar with narrative language measures and (2) learn how groups of children with varying language and cognitive profiles perform on measures of referential cohesion.

Ten 7-8-year-old children with specific language impairment participated in a 6-week program of narrative-based language intervention (NBLI) in an effort to evaluate NBLI's feasibility. Each intervention session targeted story content as well as story and sentence form using story retell and generation tasks. Eight children achieved the clinically significant improvement criterion from pre- and posttest comparisons of at least 1.45 points on a narrative quality (NQ) rating (p less than 0.013). Throughout the NBLI program, the children were informally observed to show increased self-confidence in their narrative production skills. Nearly all children preferred story generation activities over story retell tasks, while story retell tasks were favored over sentence imitation drills. Pre- and posttest comparisons for number of different words, developmental sentence score, and a sentence imitation task were nonsignificant. This indicated no further evidence of positive outcomes for NBLI. Based on the significant findings for NQ, NBLI is worthy of further investigation. Modifications to enhance its ability to produce positive gains are discussed.

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 (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), 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 SLI 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 at 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.KEY WORDS: language impairment, narrative development, story composition

Purpose: The authors examined (a) whether dose frequency of milieu communication teaching (MCT) affects children's canonical syllabic communication and (b) whether the relation between early canonical syllabic communication and later spoken vocabulary is mediated by parental linguistic mapping in children with intellectual disabilities (ID). Method: The authors drew on extant data from a recent differential treatment intensity study in which 63 toddlers with ID were randomly assigned to receive either five 1-hr MCT sessions per week (i.e., daily treatment) or one 1-hr MCT session per week (i.e., weekly treatment) for 9 months. Children's early canonical syllabic communication was measured after 3 months of treatment, and later spoken vocabulary was measured at posttreatment. Midpoint parental linguistic mapping was measured after 6 months of treatment. Results: A moderate-sized effect in favor of daily treatment was observed on canonical syllabic communication. The significant relation between canonical syllabic communication and spoken vocabulary was partially mediated by linguistic mapping. Conclusions: These results suggest that canonical syllabic communication may elicit parental linguistic mapping, which may in turn support spoken vocabulary development in children with ID. More frequent early intervention boosted canonical syllabic communication, which may jump-start this transactional language-learning mechanism. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed. Key Words: milieu communication teaching, treatment intensity, intellectual disabilities, language, vocabulary, intervention, Children with intellectual disabilities (ID) present with extremely diverse developmental profiles and achieve variable outcomes that are likely the result of differences in child and family characteristics, as well as [...]

This study investigated use of the Reading Component Model to subgroup poor readers. Poor readers were identified in second grade and subgrouped into four significantly different groups on the basis of relative strengths and weaknesses in word recognition and listening comprehension. Further analysis found poor readers' abilities were foreshadowed on kindergarten measures and were consistent into fourth grade. (Contains references.) (DB)

This longitudinal study followed reading progress in 208 children with language impairments (either specific or nonspecific) compared to normal and low IQ controls from kindergarten through fourth grade. Children with language impairment in kindergarten, especially nonspecific language impairment, were at high risk of reading disabilities in grades 2 and 4. Literacy knowledge in kindergarten usually predicted later reading outcomes. (Contains references.) (Author/DB)

This longitudinal study examined predictors of second-grade reading outcomes in kindergarten children (N=604). Findings indicated that five kindergarten variables uniquely predicted reading outcomes in second grade: (1) letter identification, (2) sentence imitation, (3) phonological awareness, (4) rapid naming, and (5) mother's education. (Contains references.) (Author/DB)

Investigates effects longitudinally of phonological processing and oral language abilities on children's reading and reading disabilities. Compares second grade good and poor readers on measures of oral language and phonological processing taken in kindergarten. Suggests that language-based theories of reading and reading disabilities must include both phonological processing and oral language abilities. (NH)

Notes inherent differences between clinical practice and experimental research in speech-language intervention. It suggests that nonexperimental research can be a link between experimental investigation and clinical application. Both researchers and practicing professionals are urged to work in a complementary manner to develop effective intervention methods. (Author/DB)

Eighteen preschoolers with language impairments who had participated in a highly effective five-month intervention that focused on expressive grammar received an additional five-month intervention. Although participants improved during Phase 2, improvements generally were not as strong as those noted for Phase l. The costly clinician-administered approach was more effective than the parent-administered intervention. (Author/DB)

This study, involving 26 children (ages 44-70 months) with impairments in grammar and phonology, found that children receiving either a clinician-administered or parent-administered intervention showed gains in expressive grammar, but there were no indirect effects on subjects' phonological production. Language intervention approaches for young children should address phonological problems directly. (Author/JDD)

Thirty children (ages 3-5) with delays in grammatical development received treatment involving focused stimulation procedures and a cyclical goal-attack strategy. Large treatment effects were observed on three of four measures of grammatical expression. Children who received treatment from clinicians showed more consistent gains than children treated by parents. (Author/JDD)

This response to commentaries on EC 604 058 attempts to update and clarify views on the application of principles of assessment and intervention in phonological disorders in children. The lack of empirical demonstration that this approach is more effective and efficient than existing procedures is noted. (Author/DB)

This paper, originally published in 1985, advocates a phonological approach to speech assessment and intervention with children having speech sound disorders in addition to traditional approaches to articulation disorders. New procedures incorporating principles of the phonological approach can be expected to consist of both new and traditional features. (DB)

This study, involving three toddlers with language impairments, evaluated effectiveness of a lexical facilitation strategy designed to increase the salience or informativeness of target objects relative to other objects and actions in the context. Complications in employing the experimental task in intervention settings are discussed, along with suggestions for modifying the task for treatment purposes. (Author/JDD)

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. Key Words: children, communication, developmental disorders, early intervention, efficacy, intervention, language disorders, When speech-language pathologists (SLPs) intervene with young children who are significantly delayed in acquisition and use of first words, they must determine whether their early focus on intentional child communication [...]

Purpose: This study examined sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI) in a manner designed to separate the contribution of cognitive capacity from the effects of syntactic structure. Method: Nineteen children with SLI, 19 typically developing children matched for age (TD-A), and 19 younger typically developing children (TD-Y) matched according to sentence comprehension test scores responded to sentence comprehension items that varied in either length or their demands on cognitive capacity, based on the nature of the foils competing with the target picture. Results: The TD-A children were accurate across all item types. The SLI and TD-Y groups were less accurate than the TD-A group on items with greater length and, especially, on items with the greatest demands on cognitive capacity. The types of errors were consistent with failure to retain details of the sentence apart from syntactic structure. Conclusions: The difficulty in the more demanding conditions seemed attributable to interference. Specifically, the children with SLI and the TD-Y children appeared to have difficulty retaining details of the target sentence when the information reflected in the foils closely resembled the information in the target sentence. Key Words: specific language impairment, syntax, memory, cognition, language disorders, Deficits in sentence comprehension have been well documented in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Studies have shown that even children described as having an expressive language disorder perform below [...]

Purpose: To determine whether preschool-age children with cochlear implants have age-appropriate phonological awareness and print knowledge and to examine the relationships of these skills with related speech and language abilities. Method: The sample comprised 24children with cochlear implants (CIs) and 23 peers with normal hearing (NH), ages 36 to 60 months. Children's print knowledge, phonological awareness, language, speech production, and speech perception abilities were assessed. Results: For phonological awareness, the CI group's mean score fell within one standard deviation of the Test of Preschool Early Literacy's (Lonigan, Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 2007) normative sample mean but was more than one standard deviation below the NH group mean. The CI group's performance did not differ significantly from that of the NH group for print knowledge. For the CI group, phonological awareness and print knowledge were significantly correlated with language, speech production, and speech perception. Together these predictor variables accounted for 34% of variance in the CI group's phonological awareness but no significant variance in their print knowledge. Conclusions: Children with CIs have the potential to develop age-appropriate early literacy skills by preschool age but are likely to lag behind their NH peers in phonological awareness. Intervention programs serving these children should target these skills with instruction and by facilitating speech and language development. Key Words: phonological awareness, print knowledge, cochlear implants, early literacy, preschool, Prior to the advent of cochlear implants (CIs), the average high school graduate who was deaf demonstrated a third- to fourth-grade reading level (Furth, 1966; Krose, Lotz, Puffer, & Osberger, [...]

Purpose: Fast ForWord-Language (FFW-L) is designed to enhance children's processing of auditory-verbal signals and, thus, their ability to learn language. As a preliminary evaluation of this claim, we examined the effects of a 5-week course of FFW-L as an adjuvant treatment with a subsequent 5-week conventional narrative-based language intervention (NBLI) that targeted narrative comprehension and production and grammatical output. Method: Twenty-three children 6-8 years of age with language impairments were assigned randomly to 1 of 3 intervention sequences: (a) FFW-L/NBLI, (b) NBLI/FFW-L, or (c) wait/NBLI. We predicted that after both treatment periods, the FFW-L/NBLI group would show greater gains on measures of narrative ability, conversational grammar, and nonword repetition than the other groups. Results: After the first 5-week study period, the intervention groups, taken together (i.e., FFW-L/NBLI and NBLI/FFW-L), significantly outperformed the no-treatment wait/NBLI group on 2 narrative measures. At the final test period, all 3 groups displayed significant time-related effects on measures of narrative ability, but there were no statistically significant between-groups effects of intervention sequence. Conclusions: This preliminary study provides no evidence to support the claim that FFW-L enhances children's response to a conventional language intervention. KEY WORDS: Fast ForWord, language intervention, child language disorders, narratives, There is evidence supporting the efficacy of interventions that teach new vocabulary, grammatical forms, and narrative content and structure to children with language impairments, especially when the children's problems are [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Purpose: To evaluate the efficacy of a 6-month course of responsivity education/ prelinguistic milieu teaching (RE/PMT) for children with developmental delay and RE/ PMT's effects on parenting stress in a randomized clinical trial. Method: Fifty-one children, age 24-33 months, with no more than 10 expressive words or signs, were randomly assigned to treatment/no-treatment groups. Thirteen children in each group had a diagnosis of Down syndrome. Results: In 1 of 2 multivariate comparisons, the RE/PMT group exhibited superior gains in communication compared with the no-treatment group. The treatment effect for overall use of intentional communication acts in the child-examiner context was significant (d= .68, 95% confidence interval = 0.12-1.24). There were no effects on child outcomes due to presence or absence of Down syndrome. RE/PMT led to modest increases in receding of child acts by parents of children who did not have Down syndrome. There were no effects on parenting stress associated with the intervention or the presence or absence of Down syndrome. Conclusions: RE/PMT may be applied clinically with the expectation of medium-size effects on the child's rate of intentional communication acts after 6 months of intervention. The approach warrants further investigation with modifications, such as delivery at higher intensity levels. KEY WORDS: early intervention, language intervention, early communication, milieu teaching, developmental delay, Prelinguistic milieu teaching (PMT) is an intervention for children with language delays who have a very limited or nonexistent lexical inventory and may be having significant difficulties in their production [...]

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 (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), 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 SLI 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 at 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. KEY WORDS: language impairment, narrative development, story composition, Children with histories of developmental language impairment (LI) often exhibit evidence of recovery from their slow start in language development by kindergarten age (Bishop & Adams, 1990; Catts, Fey, Tomblin, [...]

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. KEY WORDS: child language development, fast mapping, semantic relations, verb acquisition, word learning, Many studies involving "fast-mapping" or" quick incidental learning" (QUIL) paradigms have demonstrated that young children can learn and remember the phonological form and some of the semantic and syntactic characteristics [...]

This investigation examined the reading outcomes of children with language impairments (LI). A large subsample of children who participated in an epidemiologic study of language impairments in kindergarten (J. B. Tomblin, N. Records, P. Buckwalter, X. Zhang, E. Smith, & M. O'Brien, 1997) was followed into second and fourth grades. Participants' language, reading, and nonverbal cognitive abilities were assessed. Results indicated that children with LI in kindergarten were at a high risk for reading disabilities in second and fourth grades. This risk was higher for children with a nonspecific language impairment (nonverbal and language deficits) than for those with a specific language impairment (deficits in language alone). Children with LI in kindergarten who had improved in spoken language abilities by second and fourth grades had better reading outcomes than those with persistent language impairments. Also, children's literacy knowledge/ experience in kindergarten and their initial reading achievement in second grade were good predictors of subsequent reading outcomes. KEY WORDS: language impairment, reading disabilities, longitudinal, The ability to read accurately and fluently is a highly valued skill in any educated society. Upon entering school, most children learn to read without great difficulty. However, each year [...]

According to the Auxiliary Clarification Hypothesis (ACH), yes-no questions with sentence-initial auxiliaries (i.e., inverted questions) facilitate children's initial acquisition of auxiliary verbs. Sixteen 3-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 18 2-year-olds with typical language (TL) participated in an experiment to evaluate the ACH. The children were not yet making use of auxiliaries. Half of the children participated in twenty 30-min "enrichment" sessions over a 2-month period, during which an assistant produced 30 inverted question recasts in response to the child's own utterances. Fifteen question recasts contained the auxiliary is, and 15 contained the modal will. The other half of the children participated in play sessions but were not exposed to inverted is and will questions. Contrary to predictions based on the ACH, the results revealed no positive effects of the enrichment for is, for will, or for the broader BE and Modal auxiliary categories for either group of children. The children with TL demonstrated advantages over the children with SLI for the general category of BE forms but not for the category of Modals. Inverted questions may be too complex to foster the initial acquisition of auxiliaries in children not already using them productively. KEY WORDS: specific language impairment, auxiliary verbs, child language intervention, sentence recasts, language development, Evidence from many correlational studies suggests that the frequency of exposures to yes-no questions may be associated with the development of auxiliaries among children with typical language (TL) (Barnes, Gutfreund, [...]

Although there is a great deal of evidence for a significant developmental relationship between grammar and phonology, the nature of this relationship and its implications for the intervention of children with impairments in both grammar and phonology are unclear. The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether two approaches to grammar facilitation that placed no emphasis on phonology would have indirect effects on the phonological output of preschoolers with speech and language impairments. All 26 subjects, ages 44-70 months, had impairments both in grammar and in phonology. Ten subjects took part in a clinician-administered intervention program, eight subjects received a similar intervention program implemented by their parents, and eight children served as delayed intervention controls (Fey, Cleave, Long, & Hughes, 1993). The results indicated that despite a strong effect for the intervention on the children's grammatical output, there were no indirect effects on the subjects' phonological production. It is concluded that despite a close relationship between the development of grammar and phonology, language intervention approaches for children approximately 4 to 6 years of age should address phonological problems directly if significant effects on phonology are to be expected.