“Language Intervention with Young Children” March 28, 2000

Bonnie W. Johnson, PhD, CCC-SLP

University of IllinoisPostdoctoral Fellow

Special Education and Speech and Hearing Sciencejohnsonb@uiuc.edu

Speech & Language Disorders

• Phonological Disorders

• Voice Disorders

• Fluency Disorders

• Language Impairments

Specific Language Impairment

• Deficit in spoken language ability with no obvious accompanying condition such as– mental retardation, – neurological damage, – or hearing impairment.

• 7% of all children are born with this disorder

Example of a typical narrative of a young child with SLI

The man got on the boat. Him jump out the boat. Him rocking the boat. Him drop his thing. Him drop his other thing. Him tipping over. He fell off the boat.

What are some of the specific syntactic and semantic

difficulties of children with SLI?

• -slow development of grammatical morphemes (-ed, -3ps, irregular verbs)

• -many pronoun errors• -less diverse repertoire of verb types• -smaller average sentence length than their peers

How can we best treat these kinds of language problems?

• Modeling approaches

• Focussed stimulation

• Milieu teaching

• Expansion approaches

• Conversational recasting

Conversational Recasts: Definition

• Immediately follow a child utterance.

• Maintain the child’s central meaning.

• Repeat major lexical items.

• Reformulate clausal constituents.

• Add obligated grammatical forms, OR

• Correct grammatical forms, OR

• Provide alternative grammatical forms.

Examples of grammatical forms used in Conversational Recasts

• Copula Forms: I am silly. We were early. She is short. He was short. They are sisters. You were gone.

Articles: The dog. A cat. An apricot.

Auxiliary Verb Recasts: Examples

Child: The rabbit is running.

Adult: The rabbit’s running. OR

Adult: She is running. OR

Adult: Is the rabbit running. OR

Adult: The rabbit is.

Article Recasts: Examples

Child: That’s a orange.

Adult: That’s an orange. OR

Adult: That’s the orange.

How Recasts Might Facilitate Grammatical Development

• gives child an opportunity to make an active and immediate comparison of their grammar with the adults

• takes advantage of the child’s interest and focus • decreases the load of working memory• frees up processing resources so child can focus the

new information

Intervention Research Summary

• Previous research shows that children benefit from recasts.

• Parents of children with and without SLI do not differ in the recast input they provide their children.

• In order to benefit from recasts, children with SLI must hear them more often than naturally occurs in their environment (possibly twice as often).

Conclusion

“It seems doubtful that any single treatment approach can be ideal for all children for all structures of language that must be taught.” (Leonard, 1999)

References

Fey, M.E. (1986). Language Intervention with Young Children. Boston: Little Brown and Company.

Leonard, L. (1999). Children with Specific Language Impairment.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Proctor-Williams, K., Fey, M., Loeb, D.F., Krulik, T. (1998). The Relationship Between Parental Recasts and Morphosyntactic Use by Children with Specific Language Impairment and Children with Typical Language. Presentation at the Child Language Proseminar, Lawrence, K.S.