What is it about?
Specific Language Impairment (SLI) involves difficulty learning language without any obvious cause. Children with SLI have difficulty learning new words, placing them at risk for later reading problems and academic difficulties. In this study, adults read books to children with SLI and discussed new vocabulary words in the storybook before, during, and after reading the book. These discussions involved describing or defining the word and showing other ways to use it. The goal of the study was to determine how many times a child with SLI needed to hear a word to learn it: 12, 24, 36, or 48 times. Children with SLI needed to hear a new word 36 times to learn it. Hearing the word more than 36 times did not produce greater learning. In addition, not all children with SLI learned new words from this book reading treatment. Children with SLI who had poorer ability to manipulate speech sounds (e.g., recognize words that rhyme) or poorer vocabulary or poorer ability to repeat nonsense words were less likely to benefit from this treatment. Although this treatment is promising, further development is needed.
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Photo by Susan Yin on Unsplash
Why is it important?
SLI is a subtle and often undiagnosed language impairment even though it is as common as ADHD -- affecting about 7% of children -- and has a profound impact on academic and social success. Although word learning difficulties in children with SLI are well known, we have few proven treatments for improving word learning. This study is a first step towards developing an effective treatment for children with SLI. This study establishes how many times children need to hear the word during book reading and discussion and gives us some ideas of the skills a child with SLI may need to benefit from the treatment. Future studies can now focus on adjusting other aspects of the treatment to increase the number of words children with SLI learn and to expand the number of children with SLI who experience success with the treatment.
Perspectives
Have you ever wondered how much is enough? Treatment intensity is an important component of clinical treatment but we have minimal guidance on how much is enough. I'm glad to contribute to this important issue in clinical practice. This article shows that more isn't always better.
Professor Holly Storkel
University of Kansas
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Interactive Book Reading to Accelerate Word Learning by Kindergarten Children With Specific Language Impairment: Identifying an Adequate Intensity and Variation in Treatment Response, Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, January 2017, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2016_lshss-16-0014.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Treatment materials
This site contains all of the non-copyrighted materials used in the treatment, including (1) the list of treatment words and books; (2) the treatment schedules for the different conditions; (3) the treatment scripts (i.e., exactly how we taught the words); (4) the definition scoring rubrics.
Presentation
This is a presentation describing the study and results.
Popular Press Story
This short story provides a brief summary of the results of this work that would be appropriate to parents.
Open access article and additional data
Open access version of the article and the supplemental materials that provide more detail on how children learned words across the different treatment intensities.
Quick Video
Here's a very short, funny summary of our findings.
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
