Description
Difficulties with morphosyntax are generally regarded as a hallmark of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). These difficulties usually arise at a young age, when children with DLD fail to achieve the milestones of grammatical development. When they get older, we see a mix of problems with grammatical complexity and grammatical accuracy. Standardized language tests are designed for diagnostic purposes but they are not suited for goal setting and the evaluation of intervention. There is general agreement that the proper way to assess these difficulties is language sample analysis (LSA). However, not all structures are easily detected in LSA, which necessitates the use of (additional) language production tasks. A combination of LSA and elicitation tasks could be more appropriate. The presentations in this symposium will discuss grammatical growth in young children with DLD, several grammatical intervention approaches researched in various age groups of children with DLD, and a wide scale of procedures to assess the effect of these interventions. All interventions were provided in real life settings, such as special language treatment groups for preschoolers, in schools for children with DLD, and in speech and language therapist (SLT) private practices. Interventions were delivered in mono (SLT)- or multi-professional (SLT with pedagogical assistants) form, and with or without home assignments for parents. Intervention took either an implicit or an explicit form, or could be regarded as mixed. In general, we see that the morphosyntactic difficulties of the children with DLD groups are varied and can be quite persistent. The effects of the different therapy approaches are mostly moderate. Our discussant will focus on the pros and cons of the different approaches, the reason why these grammatical problems are so persistent in children with DLD and what would be the way forward in delivering interventions.| Period | 16 Jul 2024 |
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| Event title | IASCL: International Association for the Study of Child Language |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Prague, Czech RepublicShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |