Poor language skills undermine academic success, which eventually impacts socio-economic outcomes and quality of life. When deficient language skills are first noticed in young children, there is relatively little time available to close the gap before they are faced with the increased language demands of formal education as well as the potential for academic failure. For the 8-13% of preschool children with impaired language skills, language treatments that are faster and more effective are urgently needed. Yet current treatments are notoriously protracted and expensive, and the effects of treatment can be weak. There is a growing call among scholars to step back from the business-as-usual approach to treatment research in favor of a systematic approach that integrates promising theoretical frameworks with experimental manipulations designed to isolate and enhance the effective components of treatment approaches. This grant proposes to leverage insights from the statistical learning perspective on language acquisition, which explains rapid, unguided learning sometimes even in the presence of impaired language. The grant proposes six treatment studies that target two groups of children with poor language skills. ?Late Talkers? are children (ages 2-3 years) who are identified by their limited lexicons. Preschool children with specific language impairment (ages 4-5 years) show marked deficits in the use of grammatical morphemes. Parallel sets of studies with these two populations will determine the extent to which treatment variables enhance or detract from treatment efficacy across language domains. The goal of this work will be to identify specific treatment methods, derived from general learning principles, that clinicians can employ to enhance learning outcomes for children with impaired language skills.
Despite forty years of research on language impairments in children, information on effective treatment is sparse. The proposed studies evaluate treatment methods for vocabulary and morphosyntax deficits. The results should yield treatment procedures that can be imported into clinical practice.
| Plante, Elena; Tucci, Alexander; Nicholas, Katrina et al. (2018) Effective Use of Auditory Bombardment as a Therapy Adjunct for Children With Developmental Language Disorders. Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch 49:320-333 |
| Plante, Elena; Gómez, Rebecca L (2018) Learning Without Trying: The Clinical Relevance of Statistical Learning. Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch 49:710-722 |
| Plante, Elena; Ogilvie, Trianna; Vance, Rebecca et al. (2014) Variability in the language input to children enhances learning in a treatment context. Am J Speech Lang Pathol 23:530-45 |
