Following directions: Rehearsal and visualization strategies for children with specific language impairment

Abstract

Children with speci c language impairment (SLI) may have inef cient memory or memory management for auditory and visual representation systems. This study sought to determine if strategy training would create any residual enhancement of these memory management systems. Data revealed that immediately following intervention, elementary students taught to use a rehearsal strategy and those taught to use a rehearsal = visualization strategy made signi cant gains over a traditional language therapy group on a standardized test of following directions. However, only the rehearsal = visualization group retained its gains over the traditional group eight months after the intervention. These ndings support the long-term ef cacy of systematic training via rehearsal = visualization to increase the ability of children with SLI to follow verbal directions.

Verbal working memory in Specific Language Impairment: The effect of providing visual support

“…When greater cognitive resources were required, any task providing visual information in the presentation of the numbers assisted performance. This supports suggestions by Gill et al (2003) that multi-modal presentation results in more integrated processing, and visual information is more enduring than auditory information (Cohen, 2001).…”

“…In a study by Archibald and Gathercole (2007), children with SLI performed better on digit recall tasks when the input was provided in both verbal and visuospatial modalities, than when both the processing and storage components of the task were verbal only. In an experiment investigating the ability of children with SLI to follow instructions, children were taught to verbally rehearse an instruction, rehearse and visualize it being completed, or were given auditory based teaching on syntactic and semantic structures (Gill, Klecan-Aker, Roberts, & Fredenburg, 2003). Verbal rehearsal resulted in better performance than traditional auditory based teaching, while those children taught to verbalize and visualize the instruction showed greater maintenance of their skills at followup.…”

The effect of time on word learning: An examination of decay of the memory trace and vocal rehearsal in children with and without specific language impairment

“…It is feasible that the benefits gleaned from vocal rehearsal manifest only following repeated oral repetitions of the words to be learned. However, evidence against this potential explanation comes from a study by Gill et al (2003), who found that children with SLI benefit from vocal rehearsing oral directions one time following their presentation. It is possible that rehearsal is an additive process, and measuring the number of instances of vocal rehearsal would be beneficial to sorting out the mechanism underlying vocal rehearsal in word learning.…”

“…Vocal rehearsal was judged as either present or absent, given the lack of specification in the literature related to the influence on the amount of vocal rehearsal that would be predicted to influence performance. Additionally, there is evidence that a single instance of vocal rehearsal can lead to clear short-term gains, even for children with SLI (Gill, Klecan-Aker, Roberts, & Fredenburg, 2003). Children were given no explicit instructions about the use of vocal rehearsal, and were given no feedback for either using or not using this strategy.…”

“…This possibility is supported by Henry and Millar (1993), who found that when children use rehearsal it is beneficial to their performance. Further support for the benefit of vocal rehearsal for children with SLI comes from an investigation by Gill and colleagues who found that their ability to follow directions improved when they were trained to vocally rehearse the directions (Gill, Klecan-Aker, Roberts, & Fredenburg, 2003). If this is the case, poor performance of children with SLI on word learning tasks could not be attributable to a deficient rehearsal mechanism.…”