Mary N. Camarata

Factors accounting for the ability of children with SLI to learn agreement morphemes in intervention

The aim of this study was to uncover factors accounting for the ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) to learn agreement morphemes in intervention. Twenty-five children with SLI who participated in a six-month intervention program focused on teaching third person singular -s or auxiliary is/are/was showed a wide range of use of the target morpheme after intervention. Regression analyses showed that age and two factors expected to be related to agreement--the use of noun plural -s and subject/verb constructions prior to intervention--significantly predicted progress in the acquisition of agreement morphemes. In contrast, the pretreatment use of morphemes hypothesized to be unrelated to agreement was not a significant predictor of progress. The results indicate that the ability of children with SLI to learn agreement morphemes relies on their prior ability to use noun plural and subject/verb constructions.

Incidental receptive language growth associated with expressive grammar intervention in SLI

Children with SLI (Specific Language Impairment) display language deficits in the absence of frank neurological lesions, global cognitive deficits or significant clinical hearing loss. Although these children can display disruptions in both receptive and expressive grammar, the intervention literature has been largely focused on expressive deficits. Thus, there are numerous reports in the literature suggesting that expressive language skills can be improved using focused presentation of grammatical targets (cf. conversational recast; Camarata, Nelson & Camarata, 1994), but there have been few investigations addressing the remediation of receptive language skills in SLI for those children with receptive language deficits. The purpose of this study was to examine whether focused grammatical intervention on expressive grammar is associated with growth in receptive language in 21 children with SLI who have receptive language deficits. These children displayed significant growth in receptive language scores as an incidental or secondary association with expressive language intervention and significantly higher gains than seen in a comparison-control group with SLI and receptive language deficits (n = 6). The theoretical and clinical implications of these results are discussed.

A Comparison of Naturalistic and Analog Treatment Effects in Children with Expressive Language Disorder and Poor Preintervention Imitation Skills

The participants in this study were 4 children diagnosed with Expressive Language Disorder who displayed poor imitation skills, with scores significantly below typical levels on the Sentence Imitation subtest of the Test of Language Development-2: Primary (Newcomer & Hammill, 1988). The purpose of this study was to compare the treatment effects of both naturalistic (conversational recast) treatment and analog treatment in these participants. The results indicate that children with poor preintervention imitation skills required higher numbers of analog presentations to establish production of the language structures than was observed under the naturalistic treatment. Clinical implications of these results are discussed.

Association Between Differentiated Processing of Syllables and Comprehension of Grammatical Morphology in Children With Down Syndrome

Our purpose in this exploratory investigation was to examine the relationship between degree of impairment in grammatical morpheme comprehension and event-related potential measures of differentiated processing of speech syllables in 10 children with Down syndrome. Results strongly support the hypothesized association. Graphs of the association indicate that children with less impaired grammatical comprehension had greater amplitude differences in event-related potentials to contrast of syllables within preselected poststimulus latency ranges. The theoretical and clinical ramifications of these results are discussed.

Cross Modal Generalization of Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary in Children with Down Syndrome

Objective: A common assumption in vocabulary training for Down syndrome (DS) is that learning in one modality will generalize incidentally to untreated modalities, but few studies evaluate the validity of this presumption. The purpose of this study was to examine cross modal generalization in children with DS. Method: Five preschool children with DS were taught three sets of receptive and expressive vocabulary within a multiple probe single subject design. Vocabulary knowledge for trained and untrained modalities was probed. Results: Cross modal generalization probes indicated moderate transfer from the treated expressive modality to the untreated receptive modality but relatively low receptive generalization to the untreated expressive modality in all participants. Conclusion: These results support delivering expressive vocabulary interventions in DS provided clinicians systematically test generalization to receptive knowledge. Conversely, receptive vocabulary training, although certainly a worthwhile goal for children with DS, is less likely to generalize across modality.