The ability to narrate past personal events is important for classroom participation and socio-emotional wellbeing. Although school-age children with Down syndrome show significant challenges producing personal event narratives, there is little research to guide personal narrative intervention. This study used a single subject experimental design…

This multiple baseline across-participants single case desgin study examined the effect of small group, phonological awareness intervention on the phonological awareness skills of three school-age children with Down syndrome. Each child with Down syndrome was paired with a typical peer to participate in small group intervention, three sessions per…

This study explored participation- and impairment-based outcomes for 24 late-to-talk toddlers (M age = 20.46 months, SD = 3.09, 62.5% male) whose parents participated in Target Word™, The Hanen Program® for Parents of Children who are Late Talkers in community clinics across Ontario. Parents completed the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of dialogic reading on the expressive vocabulary skills of children with moderate to severe expressive impairments. Previous research has shown positive effects of dialogic reading on the language skills of children who are typically developing and on children who are at-risk for language…

Children with Developmental Language Disorder are likely to experience difficulties with morphosyntax, especially regular past tense marking. Few studies have evaluated the effectiveness of intervention to improve morphosyntax in young school-aged children with DLD. This study investigated the efficacy of combined explicit and implicit…

Expressive language problems are common among children with Down syndrome (DS). In typically developing (TD) children, gestures play an important role in supporting the transition from one-word utterances to two-word utterances. As far as we know, an overview on the role of gestures to support expressive language development in children with DS is…

Young people from areas of socioeconomic disadvantage (SED) are more likely to present with language difficulties, particularly vocabulary difficulties. Studies have shown the effectiveness of vocabulary interventions for children with language impairment but not for adolescents from areas of SED. This article aims to establish the effectiveness…

This article summarizes the evidence as regards the effectiveness of therapy for grammar for school-aged children with language impairments. I first review studies focusing on specific areas of grammar (both expressive and receptive targets) and then studies aiming to improve language more generally, several of which focus more on the…

Some reports suggest that there is an increase in the number of children identified as having developmental language impairment (Bercow, 2008). yet resource issues have meant that many speech and language therapy services have compromised provision in some way. Thus, efficient ways of identifying need and prioritizing intervention are required.…

Enhancing communication performance skills may help children with Down Syndrome (DS) to expand their opportunities for participation in daily life. It is a clinical challenge for speech-language pathologists (SLP) to disentangle various mechanisms that contribute to the language and communication problems that children with DS encounter. Without…

Lexicon Pirate was originally developed as a strategy intervention programme to treat lexical disorders of pre-school children. To evaluate the therapy's effectiveness for school-age students, a randomized controlled trial (RCT, N = 157) was conducted. Based on a pre--post-test design, the programme's impacts were compared with a control group…

This article describes the development and validation of the Developmental Snapshot, a 52-item parent questionnaire on child language and vocal communication development that can be administered monthly and scored automatically. The Snapshot was created to provide an easily administered monthly progress monitoring tool that enables parents to…

This study taught the passive to two children with specific language impairment (aged 8;1 and 8;2). It employed usage-based principles including "constructional grounding"; using short structures as the basis for acquiring long structures, and "construction conspiracy"; encouraging analogies between partially overlapping…

This article reports on the development and preliminary implementation trials of a modular small-group intervention targeting syntax and vocabulary for children at high risk for reading comprehension difficulties in grades prekindergarten through first. The intervention, delivered by trained paraprofessionals, included 12 weeks of 20-minute…

A 10-year-old boy with autism was part of an evaluation of an innovative intervention focused on improving communication skills. His school was using the minimal speech approach (Potter and Whittaker, 2001) with all children in accordance with government guidance. The pupil's receptive language had not been formally assessed due to his lack of…