Purpose-A randomized controlled trial (RCT) was conducted to compare the language and auditory processing outcomes of children assigned to Fast ForWord-Language (FFW-L) to the outcomes of children assigned to nonspecific or specific language intervention comparison treatments that did not contain modified speech.Method-Two hundred and sixteen children between the ages of 6 and 9 years with language impairments were randomly assigned to one of four arms: Fast ForWord-Language (FFW-L), academic enrichment (AE), computer-assisted language intervention (CALI), or individualized language intervention (ILI) provided by a speech-language pathologist. All children received 1 hour and 40 minutes of treatment, 5 days per week, for 6 weeks. Language and auditory processing measures were administered to the children by blinded examiners before treatment, immediately after treatment, 3 months after treatment, and 6 months after treatment.Results-The children in all four arms improved significantly on a global language test and a test of backward masking. Children with poor backward masking scores who were randomized to the FFW-L arm did not present greater improvement on the language measures than children with poor backward masking scores who were randomized to the other three arms. Effect sizes, analyses of standard error of measurement, and normalization percentages supported the clinical significance of NIH Public Access (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999). Participants in the FFW-L and CALI arms earned higher phonological awareness scores than children in the ILI and AE arms at the six-month follow-up testing. Conclusion-FastForWord-Language, the language intervention that provided modified speech to address a hypothesized underlying auditory processing deficit, was not more effective at improving general language skills or temporal processing skills than a nonspecific comparison treatment (AE) or specific language intervention comparison treatments (CALI and ILI) that did not contain modified speech stimuli. These findings call into question the temporal processing hypothesis of language impairment and the hypothesized benefits of using acoustically modified speech to improve language skills. The finding that children in the three treatment arms and the active comparison arm made clinically relevant gains on measures of language and temporal auditory processing informs our understanding of the variety of intervention activities that can facilitate development.Approximately seven percent of all school-age children have unusual difficulty learning and using language despite adequate hearing, nonverbal intelligence, and motor abilities (Tomblin, Records, & Zhang, 1996). This difficulty, which has been referred to by a variety of terms including language impairment, language-learning disability, specific language impairment, and language-learning impairment, can have serious social, academic, and vocational ramifications (Brinton, Spackman, Fujiki, & Ricks, 2007;Catts, Fey, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2002;Clegg, Hollis, M...

Recent theories of language development propose a direct relationship between children’s use of verb morphology and their use of subject case pronouns. Such proposals might contribute to an understanding of specifically language-impaired (SLI) children’s difficulties. These children’s extraordinary problems with verb morphology are well documented, and preliminary evidence indicates frequent pronoun case errors (e.g., her for she ) in their speech. Thus, it is possible that a collection of difficulties may be linked to a common source in these children. The objectives of this study were to determine: (a) whether subject case marking, as well as verb morphology was more limited in the speech of a group of SLI children than in the speech of a younger group of normally developing (ND) children matched for mean utterance length; (b) whether a relationship between the use of subject case marking and the use of verb morphology existed in the speech of the ND children; and, if so, (c) whether this relationship is evident in the SLI children as well, in spite of their more limited use of these features. The results revealed that the SLI children were more limited than the ND children in the use of both subject case marking and verb morphology. However, a relationship between the two types of usage was found in both groups of children.

In intervention, children with specific language impairment (SLI) have been shown to develop productive use of morphemes in response to target-specific recasts at rates generally equivalent to younger, language-matched children with typical language development (TL). Our previous work demonstrated that in conversation, the overall recast rates produced by parents of children with SLI and those with TL are similar. Still, despite their apparently typical ability to use recast input in intervention and their equivalent environmental exposure to recasts, children with SLI continue to demonstrate grammatical delays in comparison to children with TL. The purpose of this study was to examine three possible resolutions to this paradox. We examined target-specific copula and article recast usage by 10 parents of children with SLI and 10 parents of younger language-matched children with TL, and we examined their children’s productions of these same forms at three points across an 8-month period. The results provide strong support only for the third of the proposed hypotheses. Contrary to the predictions of the first hypothesis, a strong, positive relation was observed between the copula recasts used by parents of children with TL at Time 1 and their children’s use of copulas 8 months later. On the other hand, correlations between recasts of articles by parents and later production of articles by their children were not statistically reliable. Contrary to the second hypothesis, parents of children with SLI and those with TL produced equivalent rates of article and copula recasts. The third hypothesis received support on two essential counts. First, although significant correlations were found between parental recasts of copulas and production of this form 8 months later for the children with TL, no such relations were observed for the group with SLI. Second, the rate of parental target-specific recasts was less than a quarter of the rate provided in the successful intervention of Camarata, Nelson, and Camarata (1994). We conclude that children with SLI can benefit substantially from the grammar-facilitating properties of recasts, but only when the recasts are presented at rates that are much greater than those available in typical conversations with young children.

The limited variety of intervention program intensities and service delivery models used suggests that student characteristics may not be the most important factor considered when making intervention recommendations, as reported by the SLPs. Instead, caseload size and years of practice appear to influence SLPs' recommendations regarding which program intensity and service delivery models to use.

Conversational repair sequences are an important aspect of communicative interaction. These sequences may occur in the event of communication failure if a listener requests clarification of a previous aspect of the speaker's message. The purpose of this study was to investigate the repair strategies employed in conversation by children at four age levels. Ten linguistically normal children were sampled from each of the following age levels: 2:7 to 3:10, 4:10 to 5:10, 6:10 to 7:10, and 8:10 to 9:10 (years:months), resulting in a total of 40 subjects. Each subject was asked to describe a series of action pictures for an examiner who was seated behind a screen. At regular intervals, the examiner responded to the child's description by initiating a stacked repair sequence. Results indicated that subjects at all age levels complied with the initial request for clarification the majority of the time. However, with increasing age, subjects became more adept at handling the stacked sequence of requests for clarification. Older children were more responsive to the requests, and 9-year-old subjects demonstrated a wider range of strategies in providing repairs.