The tense marker total and TAP score, which were designed to capture emerging morphological abilities, contribute valuable information to a comprehensive language assessment of young bilinguals developing English. Case examples are provided to illustrate the clinical significance of including these measures in assessment.

Purpose The intersection of speech and language impairments is severely understudied. Despite repeatedly documented overlap and co-occurrence, treatment research for children with combined phonological and morphosyntactic deficits is limited. Especially, little is known about optimal treatment targets for combined phonological–morphosyntactic intervention. We offer a clinically focused discussion of the existing literature pertaining to interventions for children with combined deficits and present a case study exploring the utility of a complex treatment target in word-final position for co-occurring speech and language impairment. Method Within a school setting, a kindergarten child (aged 5;2 [years;months]) with co-occurring phonological disorder and developmental language disorder received treatment targeting a complex consonant cluster in word-final position inflected with 3rd-person singular morphology. Results For this child, training a complex consonant cluster in word-final position resulted in generalized learning to untreated consonants and clusters across word positions. However, morphological generalization was not demonstrated consistently across measures. Conclusions These preliminary findings suggest that training complex phonology in word-final position can result in generalized learning to untreated phonological targets. However, limited improvement in morphology and word-final phonology highlights the need for careful monitoring of cross-domain treatment outcomes and additional research to identify the characteristics of treatment approaches, techniques, and targets that induce cross-domain generalization learning in children with co-occurring speech-language impairment.

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