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

Across dialects of English, children with developmental language disorder demonstrate weaknesses in both tense morphology and complex syntax, yet intervention targets often address these domains separately. This study examined whether clinician input during a complex syntax intervention provides rich and varied models of tense morphology. Using a secondary analysis of data from 1 arm of a randomized controlled teletherapy trial, we analyzed clinician utterances during an intervention targeting complement clauses embedded in science instruction for 10 children with developmental language disorder (4-7 years old). A total of 1753 clinician utterances containing complement clauses were coded. Clinicians produced 2491 tense morphemes, with regular past tense occurring most frequently, followed by verbal -s and irregular past tense. Past tense morphemes occurred primarily in independent clauses, whereas present tense forms occurred more often in dependent clauses; copula and auxiliary BE forms were largely confined to dependent clauses. Clinicians produced 47 unique matrix verbs, most with overt tense marking. Results suggest that complement clause interventions can simultaneously support tense morphology through dense, structurally informative input, supporting integrated approaches to grammar intervention.