Lexicon Pirate was originally developed as a strategy intervention programme to treat lexical disorders of pre-school children. To evaluate the therapy’s effectiveness for school-age students, a randomized controlled trial (RCT, N = 157) was conducted. Based on a pre–post-test design, the programme’s impacts were compared with a control group (CG) that did not receive the strategy training. Potential long-term impacts were analysed with a follow-up test (four months after the intervention was completed). Therapeutic success is interpreted by an improved performance in standardized tests compared to the CG. The experimental group (EG) made significant to highly significant progress on both lexical and syntactical levels. The improvements of the EG are statistically significantly higher compared to the control group’s performance (exception: Subtest 1, P-ITPA). Consequently, the trial proves the advantages of this strategy therapy compared to the CG, finding that the Lexicon Pirate is an effective approach for treating lexical disorders of school-age students.

The most common interventions for children with lexical disorders are forms and combinations of interventions focusing on phonological and semantic elaboration and retrieval. Systematic reviews of intervention studies on children with lexical disorders show that a significant generalization of therapeutic effects to untrained vocabulary was rarely achieved. The aim of this study was to investigate whether preschool children with lexical deficits profit from an intervention approach that focuses on implementing lexical learning strategies. A randomized controlled trial was conducted. The control group consisted of 25 children, who received language support in their kindergarten. The 26 children in the experimental group additionally received 15 intervention sessions of the lexical strategy intervention 'lexicon pirate'. Intervention effects were measured using a standardized expressive vocabulary assessment one year after the intervention. All children significantly improved on the expressive vocabulary measure. In addition, the gain in expressive vocabulary size was higher for children in the experimental group than for the participants in the control group. Further analysis revealed that 'lexicon pirate' was as effective for children with qualitative (word-finding) lexical deficits as for those with quantitative (vocabulary) lexical deficits. The gain in expressive vocabulary size was independent of nonverbal IQ, deficits in phonological working memory or other possible influencing factors.

A critical analysis of the data reveals two important implications for future interventions: (1) the reduction of language material to ensure proper use of gender during therapy sequences; and (2) the adaptation of therapeutic steps to the learning tempo of the pupils.

Zusammenfassung Der Artikel besch?ftigt sich mit der Frage, ob mit einer deutschsprachigen strategieorientierten lexikalischen Therapie neben Verbesserungen im deutschen Wortschatz Effekte auf den Wortschatzumfang der nicht behandelten Erstsprache T?rkisch erreicht werden k?nnen. Dazu werden Daten einer Teilstichprobe t?rkisch-deutschsprachiger Kinder (n=25) aus einer randomisierten und kontrollierten Studie [1, 2] ausgewertet. Die Ergebnisse weisen auf erste positive Tendenzen eines cross-linguistischen Transfers auf die t?rkische Erstsprache und das totale expressive Vokabular (deutsch und t?rkisch) hin.

This study analysed the effects of a classroom intervention focusing on phonological awareness and/or automatized word recognition in children with a deficit in the domains of phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming ("double deficit"). According to the double-deficit hypothesis (Wolf & Bowers, 1999), these children belong to the group who show the most pronounced difficulties when learning how to read and write.Our results suggest that children with a double deficit are at great risk of developing dyslexia unless they receive specific support. Moreover, the results of the intervention study are the first to show how German speaking children with a double deficit can be adequately supported within the framework of standard beginners' reading and writing lessons in inclusive classrooms so that impending difficulties in the acquisition of written language can be successfully prevented. The support measures focus on a training of phonological awareness and automatized processing of sublexical orthographic units. However, potential modifications of the training are currently being discussed since not all children in the training groups were able to benefit satisfactorily.