Purpose This study examines the effects of enhanced conversational recast for treating morphological errors in preschoolers with developmental language disorder. The study assesses the effectiveness of this treatment in an individual or group ( n = 2) setting and the possible benefits of exposing a child to his or her partner's treatment target in addition to his or her own. Method Twenty children were assigned to either an individual ( n = 10) or group ( n = 10, 2 per group) condition. Each child received treatment for 1 morpheme (the target morpheme) for approximately 5 weeks. Children in the group condition had a different target from their treatment partner. Pretreatment and end treatment probes were used to compare correct usage of the target morpheme and a control morpheme. For children in the group condition, the correct usage of their treatment partner's target morpheme was also examined. Results Significant treatment effects occurred for both treatment conditions only for morphemes treated directly (target morpheme). There was no statistically significant difference between the treatment conditions at the end of treatment or at follow-up. Children receiving group treatment did not demonstrate significant gains in producing their partner's target despite hearing the target modeled during treatment. Conclusions This study provides the evidence base for enhanced conversational recast treatment in a small group setting, a treatment used frequently in school settings. Results indicate the importance of either attention to the recast or expressive practice (or both) to produce gains with this treatment. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7859975

Purpose: This experiment investigated whether input variability would affect initial learning of noun gender subcategories in an unfamiliar, natural language (Russian), as it is known to assist learning of other grammatical forms. Method: Forty adults (20 men, 20 women) were familiarized with examples of masculine and feminine Russian words. Half of the participants were familiarized with 32 different root words in a high-variability condition. The other half were familiarized with 16 different root words, each repeated twice for a total of 32 presentations in a high-repetition condition. Participants were tested on untrained members of the category to assess generalization.Familiarization and testing was completed 2 additional times. Results: Only participants in the high-variability group showed evidence of learning after an initial period of familiarization. Participants in the high-repetition group were able to learn after additional input. Both groups benefited when words included 2 cues to gender compared to a single cue. Conclusions:The results demonstrate that the degree of input variability can influence learners' ability to generalize a grammatical subcategory (noun gender) from a natural language. In addition, the presence of multiple cues to linguistic subcategory facilitated learning independent of variability condition.A major theoretical issue concerning language learning is how to structure the input in ways that best facilitate learning. In the present experiment, we investigated whether input variability might facilitate the learning of grammatical word forms in an unfamiliar language. A growing body of research has found that increasing the variability in the input to learners is beneficial for the learning of various linguistic skills, including word learning (Perry, Samuelson, Malloy, & Schiffer, 2010), speech sound categorization (Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002;Sadakata & McQueen, 2013), and reading (Apfelbaum, Hazeltine, & McMurray, 2013). Variability in spoken input has also been found to facilitate grammar learning and promote generalization of the grammar (Gómez, 2002;Torkildsen, Dailey, Aguilar, Gómez, & Plante, 2013). The effect of variability on learning grammatical structures was demonstrated in a seminal study by Gómez (2002), who examined the unguided learning of nonadjacent dependencies using an artificial language. A nonadjacent dependency describes a relation between two elements separated by one or more intervening elements. This type of dependency has many counterparts in natural language. For example, the English present progressive verb tense (e.g., is singing) involves a nonadjacent dependency between is and ing (Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998). Gómez (2002) used similar aXb grammatical forms in which the element a (a nonword) predicts the element b (a different nonword) with any number of nonwords (X ) occurring between the a and b elements. The variability of input was manipulated by drawing the middle element (X ) from a pool of two, six, 12, or 24 different X elements. The r...

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