Use of Narrative-Based Language Intervention With Children Who Have Specific Language Impairment

Abstract

Ten 7-8-year-old children with specific language impairment participated in a 6-week program of narrative-based language intervention (NBLI) in an effort to evaluate NBLI's feasibility. Each intervention session targeted story content as well as story and sentence form using story retell and generation tasks. Eight children achieved the clinically significant improvement criterion from pre- and posttest comparisons of at least 1.45 points on a narrative quality (NQ) rating (p<.013). Throughout the NBLI program, the children were informally observed to show increased self-confidence in their narrative production skills. Nearly all children preferred story generation activities over story retell tasks, while story retell tasks were favored over sentence imitation drills. Pre- and posttest comparisons for number of different words, developmental sentence score, and a sentence imitation task were nonsignificant. This indicated no further evidence of positive outcomes for NBLI. Based on the significant findings for NQ, NBLI is worthy of further investigation. Modifications to enhance its ability to produce positive gains are discussed.

Genetic Effects on Children’s Conversational Language Use

“…Validity of utterance length as a meaningful measure of language development is supported by (a) developmental change during school-age years (e.g., Leadholm & Miller, 1992;Rice, 2004;Rice, Redmond, & Hoffman, 2006), (b) differentiation of language ability (e.g., Klee, Schaffer, May, Membrino, & Mougey, 1989), and (c) frequent use in language research on school-age children (e.g., Leonard & Finneran, 2003;Rice, Wexler, & Hershberger, 1998;Swanson, Fey, Mills, & Hood, 2005).…”

El bilingüismo y su incidencia en el léxico infantil bilingüe

“…En los textos producidos por los sujetos de la muestra en esta investigación, la diversidad léxica será una estimación eficiente e informativa del análisis de los tipos léxicos o palabras diferentes, en relación con el número total de palabras producidas en una tarea comunicativa. La diversidad léxica ha sido utilizada en numerosos estudios para estimar el tamaño del vocabulario expresivo en individuos de diferentes edades, también ha sido considerada como una medida robusta y sensible al desarrollo para medir habilidades léxicas de los niños en una tarea comunicativa (Swanson et al, 2005;Uccelli y Páez, 2007).…”

Discourse: Assessment and Therapy

“…These combined reviews also uncovered important evidence that narrative discourse intervention for children with DLD is effective. The vast majority of the reviewed studies resulted in positive discourse outcomes for the child [62][63][64][65][66][67]. In particular, the evidence suggests that there are two key components to successful discourse intervention with this group of children: (1) interventions should involve encouraging a child to repeatedly retell targeted discourse and (2) interventions should emphasise discourse information content elements.…”

“…Procedures included the modelling of narrative discourses to the child, for them to practise and re-tell [62,63]. Other interventions required the child to generate their own narrative discourse, either spontaneously or from a stimulus such as a picture cue [62]. Another procedure involved asking the child 'probe questions', to elicit missing discourse information (missing story grammar components), such as asking 'What happened then?…”

“…Perhaps surprisingly, there was little overlap between the intervention protocols of the studies. Procedures included the modelling of narrative discourses to the child, for them to practise and re-tell [62,63]. Other interventions required the child to generate their own narrative discourse, either spontaneously or from a stimulus such as a picture cue [62].…”