Complex syntax intervention for Developmental Language Impairment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0009/000424Keywords:
DLD, elative clauses, metalinguistic approach, syntaxAbstract
Intervention for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) appears to be beneficial and contributes to sustainable linguistic gains. This paper reports on a pilot intervention study carried out in Cyprus that examined the efficacy of language treatment targeting complex syntactic structures. The language skills of a nine-year-old girl with DLD are evaluated at two distinct time points: immediately before and after the intervention. The child received therapy sessions based on the MetaTaal framework, specifically targeting relative clauses. Post-intervention measurements showed marginal improvement in both the production and comprehension of relative clauses. Notably, more pronounced improvements were observed in a Complex Sentence Repetition Task, suggesting that these complex grammatical structures have begun to emerge in her underlying linguistic system.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.