Tense Morphology in Clinicians' Input During Complex Syntax Intervention for Children's Academic Discourse and...

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often exhibit deficits in both tense morphology and complex syntax.
• Current interventions frequently target these grammatical areas in isolation, potentially limiting overall language development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether complex syntax interventions, specifically targeting complement clauses, offer sufficient and varied models of tense morphology for children with DLD.
• To determine if integrated grammar intervention is feasible and effective.

Main Methods:

• Secondary analysis of data from a randomized controlled teletherapy trial involving 10 children with DLD (ages 4-7).
• Analysis of 1753 clinician utterances containing complement clauses during a science-based complex syntax intervention.
• Coding of tense morphemes and matrix verbs within clinician-produced complex sentences.

Main Results:

• Clinicians produced 2491 tense morphemes, with regular past tense being most common, followed by verbal -s and irregular past tense.
• Past tense morphemes predominantly appeared in independent clauses, while present tense and BE forms were more frequent in dependent clauses.
• A variety of 47 unique matrix verbs were used, mostly with explicit tense marking.

Conclusions:

• Complex syntax interventions focusing on complement clauses can provide dense and structurally informative input for tense morphology.
• This supports the efficacy of integrated approaches to grammar intervention for children with DLD.
• Teletherapy can effectively deliver complex syntax interventions that simultaneously target multiple grammatical domains.