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

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