RE/PMT may be applied clinically with the expectation of medium-size effects on the child's rate of intentional communication acts after 6 months of intervention. The approach warrants further investigation with modifications, such as delivery at higher intensity levels.

Purpose The authors sought to determine whether a program of 5 weekly doses of milieu communication teaching (MCT) would yield improvements in children’s communication and word use compared with a once-weekly delivery of the same treatment. Method Sixty-four children with intellectual and communication delay were randomly assigned to receive 60-min sessions of MCT either 1 time or 5 times per week over a 9-month treatment. Growth curves were fit to data collected at 5 points before, during, and after the MCT was delivered. Results With groups collapsed, significant growth across the experimental period was observed on all measures, but this was not associated unconditionally with treatment intensity. Children who played with 9 or more objects during a standard play assessment, an empirically identified cut-point, benefitted more from the high- than from the low-intensity treatment on lexical measures (Hedges’s g range = .49 to .65). Conclusions More MCT is not always better for all children. Clinicians can expect that increasing the frequency of MCT sessions will yield moderate enhancement of outcomes if the child has high interest in objects.

M. E. Fey et al. (2006) reported that 6 months of RE/PMT led to a significant treatment effect in the use of intentional communication in 1 of 2 communication sampling contexts. This finding, combined with evidence from other studies, suggests that RE/PMT may be applied clinically at low intensity with the expectation of medium-sized effects on children's rate of intentional communication acts over the short term. The results of the present study, however, provide no evidence for the anticipated longer term benefits of this intervention. Further investigation of the approach at higher intensity levels and for longer periods of time is warranted.

We tested four predictions based on the assumption that optional infinitives can be attributed to properties of the input whereby children inappropriately extract nonfinite subject-verb sequences (e.g. the girl run) from larger input utterances (e.g. Does the girl run? Let’s watch the girl run). Thirty children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 30 typically developing children heard novel and familiar verbs that appeared exclusively either in utterances containing nonfinite subject-verb sequences or in simple sentences with the verb inflected for third person singular –s. Subsequent testing showed strong input effects, especially for the SLI group. The results provide support for input-based factors as significant contributors not only to the optional infinitive period in typical development, but also to the especially protracted optional infinitive period seen in SLI.

Purpose This study examined sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI) in a manner designed to separate the contribution of cognitive capacity from the effects of syntactic structure. Method Nineteen children with SLI, 19 typically developing children matched for age (TD-A) and 19 younger typically developing children (TD-Y) matched according to sentence comprehension test scores responded to sentence comprehension items that varied in either length or their demands on cognitive capacity based on the nature of the foils competing with the target picture. Results The TD-A children were accurate across all item types. The SLI and TD-Y groups were less accurate than the TD-A group on items with greater length and, especially, on items with the greatest demands on cognitive capacity. The types of errors were consistent with failure to retain details of the sentence apart from syntactic structure. Conclusions The difficulty in the more demanding conditions seemed attributable to interference. Specifically, the children with SLI and the TD-Y children appeared to have difficulty retaining details of the target sentence when the information reflected in the foils closely resembled the information in the target sentence.