What Matters When Providing Conversational Recast Treatment?

What is it about?

Conversational recast treatment is a helpful clinical treatment for young children who have difficulty with spoken grammar as a result of a language disorder. Recasting is when an adult repeats a child's sentence back to them, correcting any grammatical errors. For example, if a child says "Yesterday that dog jump," the adult might recast it as "Right, yesterday that dog jumped". By repeating the child's sentence with corrected grammar, the adult is providing implicit, or indirect modeling of correct grammatical structures. When recasting is provided in focused, one-on-one treatment sessions, it can help children with their use of tense markers and words like pronouns and prepositions. This study looks back at 12 years of data on recasting treatment to see what components of recasting treatment are most useful for helping children learn. We found that it is extremely important for clinicians to get the child's attention right before recasting their utterance. Results also suggest that incorporating high variability in the treatment is important for children to make progress. This means that clinicians should use many different words to recast the child's grammar. For example, instead of saying "The dog is running," "The cat is running," "The horse is running," clinicians should say things like "The cat is running," "This dog is dashing," "My horse is sprinting". In this example, the child is more likely to pick up on the grammatical form "is -ing" because that is the only thing that stays constant. We also found that recasting can be delivered in 15-minute sessions, or spaced out over time as long as the same attention and variability are incorporated, and the child hears 24 recasts per session. Our results also indicate that there was no meaningful difference in children's treatment progress depending on the grammatical form that was targeted. This suggests that many of the popular theories about which grammatical forms should be easier or harder to treat likely need more data-based studies of their validity.

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Why is it important?

Our results confirm many years of individual treatment data showing that input variability is an important aspect of conversational recasting. We also demonstrate for the first time the significance of having the child's attention at the time of recast delivery. This study also provides empirical data that could potentially inform the refinement of theories of language acquisition and treatment for children with language disorders.