Children's Responses to Grammatically Complete and Incomplete Prompts to Imitate

Purpose: Various language intervention programs instruct clinicians and parents of children with language learning difficulty to expand their child's utterance by adding one or two words. This often results in a telegraphic utterance, one that is devoid of function words and inflectional endings. Other programs not only advocate the use of telegraphic models but explicitly prompt the child to produce a grammatically incomplete, and therefore, incorrect utterance. These programs make the assumption that prompts to imitate telegraphic models aid in production by making a targeted language goal easier for the child to imitate. The purpose of this investigation is to determine if children in the early stage of combining words are more likely to respond to elicited imitation prompts that are telegraphic than to elicited imitation prompts that are grammatically complete. Method: Five children between the ages of 30-51 months with expressive language delay participated in a single-case alternating treatment design with fourteen sessions evenly split between a grammatical and a telegraphic condition. Children were given 15 elicitive prompts to imitate a semantic relation that was either grammatically complete (e.g., Say the frog is jumping) or telegraphic (e.g., Say duck walking). Children's responses to the elicitive prompts that contained a semantic relation or a semantic relation with a function word were analyzed separately using a randomization test. Results: No differences between conditions were found for the number of responses that contained a semantic relation. Children responded to prompts that were grammatically complete as frequently as to prompts that were telegraphic. In contrast, there was a statistically significant difference for the inclusion of a function word. Three of the five children were more likely to include a function word in their response when the elicitive prompt was grammatical. Two children did not include a function word in either condition. Conclusion: Reducing an elicitive prompt to imitate to the point that it is no longer grammatical does not offer any advantage as a language intervention technique. Children are just as likely to respond to a grammatically complete elicitive prompt. Further, including function words encourages children, who are developmentally ready, to imitate them

Examination of the ADOS-2 Expressive Language Score in Fragile X Syndrome

The development of an expressive language score for people with autism based on the ADOS-2 was recently reported by Mazurek et al. (2019). The current study examined the construct validity of the ADOS-2 expressive language score (ELS) in a sample of adolescents with fragile X syndrome (n = 45, 10 girls), a neurodevelopmental disorder with high rates of autism symptomology. The ADOS-2 ELS showed strong convergent validity with multiple assessments of expressive language, receptive language, and nonverbal cognition. Divergent validity was demonstrated between the expressive language score and chronological age, symptoms of anxiety/depression, and rule-breaking behaviors. This expressive language score is a promising measure of expressive language ability that can be used in research when other language assessments are unavailable

Maternal well-being and family adaptation during COVID-19 in fragile X syndrome

Mothers of children with fragile X syndrome are at increased risk of experiencing anxiety and depression due to potential genetic risk and to stress associated with parenting a child with significant behavioral, emotional, and educational support needs. During the initial shutdown and subsequent restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic, mothers of children with fragile X reported experiencing elevated levels of anxiety and depression relative to their usual levels of well-being. Many indicated that the negative consequences of exposure to COVID-19 and related stressors, as well as the impacts of the pandemic on their family, directly affected their anxiety and depression. Mothers reported on specific sources of distress as well as potential sources of resilience and positive adaptation that occurred during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic

Sources of Misinterpretation in the Input and Their Implications for Language Intervention With English-Speaking Children

Purpose: In English and related languages, many preschool-age children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulties using tense and agreement consistently. In this review article, we discuss two potential input-related sources of this difficulty and offer several possible strategies aimed at circumventing input obstacles. Method: We review a series of studies from English, supplemented by evidence from computational modeling and studies of other languages. Collectively, the studies show that instances of failures to express tense and agreement in DLD resemble portions of larger sentences in everyday input in which tense and agreement marking is appropriately absent. Furthermore, experimental studies show that children\u27s use of tense and agreement can be swayed by manipulating details in fully grammatical input sentences. Results: The available evidence points to two particular sources of input that may contribute to tense and agreement inconsistency. One source is the appearance of subject + nonfinite verb sequences that appear in auxiliary-fronted questions (e.g., Is [the girl running]? Does [the boy like popcorn]?) and as dependent clauses in more complex sentences (e.g., Help [her wash the dishes]; We saw [the frog hopping]). The other source is the frequent appearance of bare stems in the input, whether nonfinite (e.g., go in Make him go fast) or finite (e.g., go in I go, you go). Conclusions: Although the likely sources of input are a natural part of the language that all children hear, procedures that alter the distribution of this input might be used in the early stages of intervention. Subsequent steps can incorporate more explicit comprehension and production techniques. A variety of suggestions are offered

Is More Better? Milieu Communication Teaching in Toddlers With Intellectual Disabilities

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