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“Language Intervention with
Young Children”
March 28, 2000
Bonnie W. Johnson, PhD, CCC-SLP
University of Illinois
Postdoctoral Fellow
Special Education and Speech and Hearing Science
[email protected]
Speech & Language Disorders
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Phonological Disorders
Voice Disorders
Fluency Disorders
Language Impairments
Specific Language Impairment
• Deficit in spoken language ability with no
obvious accompanying condition such as
– mental retardation,
– neurological damage,
– or hearing impairment.
• 7% of all children are born with this
disorder
Example of a typical narrative of
a young child with SLI
The man got on the boat. Him jump out the
boat. Him rocking the boat. Him drop his
thing. Him drop his other thing. Him tipping
over. He fell off the boat.
What are some of the
specific syntactic and semantic
difficulties of children with SLI?
• -slow development of grammatical morphemes (ed, -3ps, irregular verbs)
• -many pronoun errors
• -less diverse repertoire of verb types
• -smaller average sentence length than their peers
How can we best treat these
kinds of language problems?
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Modeling approaches
Focussed stimulation
Milieu teaching
Expansion approaches
Conversational recasting
Conversational Recasts:
Definition
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Immediately follow a child utterance.
Maintain the child’s central meaning.
Repeat major lexical items.
Reformulate clausal constituents.
Add obligated grammatical forms, OR
Correct grammatical forms, OR
Provide alternative grammatical forms.
Examples of grammatical forms
used in Conversational Recasts
• Copula Forms:
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I am silly.
She is short.
They are sisters.
We were early.
He was short.
You were gone.
Articles:
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The dog.
A cat.
An apricot.
Auxiliary Verb Recasts:
Examples
Child:
The rabbit is running.
Adult:
Adult:
Adult:
Adult:
The rabbit’s running. OR
She is running. OR
Is the rabbit running. OR
The rabbit is.
Article Recasts: Examples
Child:
Adult:
Adult:
That’s a orange.
That’s an orange. OR
That’s the orange.
How Recasts Might Facilitate
Grammatical Development
• gives child an opportunity to make an active and
immediate comparison of their grammar with the
adults
• takes advantage of the child’s interest and focus
• decreases the load of working memory
• frees up processing resources so child can focus the
new information
Intervention Research Summary
• Previous research shows that children
benefit from recasts.
• Parents of children with and without SLI do
not differ in the recast input they provide
their children.
• In order to benefit from recasts, children
with SLI must hear them more often than
naturally occurs in their environment
(possibly twice as often).
Conclusion
“It seems doubtful that any single treatment
approach can be ideal for all children for all
structures of language that must be taught.”
(Leonard, 1999)
References
Fey, M.E. (1986). Language Intervention with Young
Children. Boston: Little Brown and Company.
Leonard, L. (1999). Children with Specific Language
Impairment.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Proctor-Williams, K., Fey, M., Loeb, D.F., Krulik, T.
(1998). The Relationship Between Parental Recasts and
Morphosyntactic Use by Children with Specific Language
Impairment and Children with Typical Language.
Presentation at the Child Language Proseminar, Lawrence,
K.S.