Explicit Grammar Intervention in Young School-Aged Children With Developmental Language Disorder: An Efficacy Study...

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) impacts language acquisition in children.
• Accurate grammatical morphology, such as regular past tense marking, is crucial for effective communication.
• Children with DLD often exhibit persistent difficulties with grammatical morphemes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the efficacy of an explicit, combined metalinguistic training and grammar facilitation intervention.
• To improve regular past tense marking in young children with DLD.
• To assess the maintenance of treatment gains and effects on standardized language measures.

Main Methods:

• An ABA across-participant multiple-baseline single-case experimental design was employed.
• Nine children (aged 5;10-6;8) with DLD received 20 individual therapy sessions over 10 weeks.
• Intervention combined SHAPE CODING metalinguistic training with a systematic cueing hierarchy for grammar facilitation.

Main Results:

• Significant improvements in past tense production were observed for trained (8/9 children) and untrained verbs (7/9 children).
• Treatment gains were maintained for 5 weeks post-intervention.
• Eight of nine children showed significant improvement on standardized expressive grammar measures.

Conclusions:

• Explicit grammar interventions are effective for improving past tense marking in children with DLD.
• The intervention demonstrated efficacy in improving morphosyntactic skills.
• Further research should explore group comparison studies and broader grammatical improvements.