An efficacy study of an indirect or Parent-based intervention programme involving Video Home Training (PVHT) was conducted with a focus on parental strategies to (re-)establish coherence in conversations between young children with Developmental Language Delay (DLD) and their parents or caregivers. In order to assess the efficacy of the PVHT programme, linguistic and conversational coherence outcomes were compared to those for a Direct Child language Intervention (DCI) programme. A randomized controlled group design with follow-up measures was used: there were 11 children with their parents in the PVHT group and 11 children with their parents in the DCI group. Compared to the DCI programme the PVHT programme showed significant short-term and long-term effects on mean length of utterance, grammar, language comprehension and conversational coherence at post-treatment and follow-up. The results are discussed in light of previous studies, VHT and the PVHT-focus on parental training of strategies to create conversational coherence.

The language problems that emerged from the two samples of children with SLI could be described as falling into four types. Based on these language types, four subgroups of children with SLI could be distinguished, each with a specific profile. Some subgroups had severe problems on one specific type of language problem; others had severe problems in more than one type of language problem when compared to the other subgroups of the same age sample. The different profiles may indicate that a more dynamic approach is needed in intervention, considering the presence of both compensating and restricting factors within each child with SLI.

No abstract

The findings suggest that the neuronal processing of semantic information at sentence level is atypical in preschoolers with SLI compared with TD children.

In two experiments, the claim was tested that the font “Dyslexie”, specifically designed for people with dyslexia, eases reading performance of children with (and without) dyslexia. Three questions were investigated. (1) Does the Dyslexie font lead to faster and/or more accurate reading? (2) Do children have a preference for the Dyslexie font? And, (3) is font preference related to reading performance? In Experiment 1, children with dyslexia (n = 170) did not read text written in Dyslexie font faster or more accurately than in Arial font. The majority preferred reading in Arial and preference was not related to reading performance. In Experiment 2, children with (n = 102) and without dyslexia (n = 45) read word lists in three different font types (Dyslexie, Arial, Times New Roman). Words written in Dyslexie font were not read faster or more accurately. Moreover, participants showed a preference for the fonts Arial and Times New Roman rather than Dyslexie, and again, preference was not related to reading performance. These experiments clearly justify the conclusion that the Dyslexie font neither benefits nor impedes the reading process of children with and without dyslexia.

The narrative analysis demonstrates different developmental trajectories for morphosyntactic accuracy and grammatical complexity in children with SLI and typically developing peer and language-matched children. In the group with SLI, grammatical skills continue to develop.

Background Currently, most research on the effective treatment of morphosyntax in children with specific language impairment (SLI) pertains to younger children. In the last two decades, several studies have provided evidence that intervention for older school‐age children with SLI can be effective. These metalinguistic intervention approaches teach grammatical rules explicitly and use shapes and colours as two‐dimensional visual support. Reading or writing activities form a substantial part of these interventions. However, some children with SLI are poor readers and might benefit more from an approach that is less dependent on literacy skills. Aims To examine the effectiveness of a combined metalinguistic and multimodal approach in older school‐age children with SLI. The intervention was adapted to suit poor readers and targeted the improvement of relative clause production, because relative clauses still pose difficulties for older children with SLI. Methods & Procedures Participants were 12 monolingual Dutch children with SLI (mean age 11;2). All children visited a special school for children with speech and language disorders in the Netherlands. A quasi‐experimental multiple‐baseline design was chosen to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. A set of tasks was constructed to test relative clause production and comprehension. Two balanced versions were alternated in order to suppress a possible learning effect from multiple presentations of the tasks. After 3 monthly baseline measurements, the children received individual treatment with a protocolled intervention programme twice a week during 5 weeks. The tests were repeated directly post‐therapy and at a retention measurement 3 months later. During the intervention programme, the speech therapist delivering the treatment remained blind to the test results. Outcomes & Results No significant changes were found during the baseline measurements. However, measurement directly post‐therapy showed that 5 h of intervention produced significant improvement on the relative clause production tasks, but not on the relative clause comprehension task. The gains were also maintained 3 months later. Conclusions & Implications The motor and tactile/kinesthetic dimensions of the ‘MetaTaal’ metalinguistic intervention approach are a valuable addition to the existing metalinguistic approaches. This study supports the evidence that grammatical skills in older school‐age children with SLI can be remediated with direct intervention using a metalinguistic approach. The current tendency to diminish direct intervention for older children with SLI should be reconsidered.

In this study we compared the lexical access skills of 25 deaf children with cochlear implants, 13 hard-of-hearing children and 20 children with specific language impairments (SLI). Twenty-one age-matched typically developing children served as controls. The two groups of children with hearing loss in the present study had good speech perception abilities. We used a cross-modal picture-word interference paradigm to examine the lexical access skills. Results showed that children with SLI revealed overall slower reaction times and produced more errors than the implanted children, the hard-of-hearing children, and the control children. Both groups of children with hearing loss did not reveal slower reaction times than the control children. Semantic and phonological representations in long-term memory were affected more by inadequacies in linguistic processing than by a deficit in auditory perception, suggesting that a measure of lexical access could be a suitable clinical marker for SLI identification. We recommend to differentiate between the clinical groups of children regarding the focus of their language training.