Teaching word-finding strategies to severely language-impaired children

The present study describes how four severely language-impaired pupils participated in an intervention programme aimed towards improving their word-finding skills. Short intervention sessions that concentrated upon a combination of both elaboration and retrieval techniques were conducted over a period of 4 weeks. Four control subjects received language therapy that was unrelated to word-finding activities. The subjects were matched for age, sex and word-finding difficulties. Results revealed that the two groups differed significantly on the accuracy of word retrieval. The four subjects that had received specific intervention improved in their ability to retrieve words. Two-tailed t-tests indicated that the improvement was highly significant at the probability level of p < 0.01 between the stages of testing. The contribution of the intervention sessions towards facilitating word-finding strategies of the four children is discussed.