Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine whether a verb-focused language intervention was effective in increasing children’s verb-vocabulary. In particular, this study investigated whether the treatment resulted in changes to children’s production of target words compared to control words for children who are late talkers. Method: The study utilised a single-subject, multiple baseline across behaviours design. Four children, aged 26-to-39 months who exhibited delayed expressive language development participated in the study. At the beginning of the study, all children had poor expressive language performance indicated by a mean length of utterance two standard deviations below the mean expected for their age and limited vocabulary measured by the New Zealand Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences. New verb-vocabulary items were randomly assigned to intervention and untreated control conditions and probed at regular intervals over a period of eight weeks. Results: All the participants showed increased use of the target verbs compared to the control verbs during the intervention and post-intervention phase. Conclusion: The findings suggest that a verb-focused language intervention was effective in increasing the verb-vocabulary of late talkers. Further research is warranted to determine whether similar results can be found with a larger cohort and whether these gains are sustained over time.

Recent research has shown that the early lexical representations children establish in their second year of life already seem to be phonologically detailed enough to allow differentiation from very similar forms. In contrast to these findings children with specific language impairment show problems in discriminating phonologically similar word forms up to school age. In our study we investigated the question whether there would be differences in the processing of phonological details in normally developing and in children with low language performance in the second year of life. This was done by a retrospective study in which in the processing of phonological details was tested by a preferential looking experiment when the children were 19 months old. At the age of 30 months children were tested with a standardized German test of language comprehension and production (SETK2). The preferential looking data at 19 months revealed an opposite reaction pattern for the two groups: while the children scoring normally in the SETK2 increase their fixations of a pictured object only when it was named with the correct word, children with later low language performance did so only when presented with a phonologically slightly deviant mispronunciation. We suggest that this pattern does not point to a specific deficit in processing phonological information in these children but might be related to an instability of early phonological representations, and/or a generalized problem of information processing as compared to typically developing children.

PURPOSE: Parent-child reading allows parents to extend the walls of their home to introduce their children to novel places and scenarios, and is an important factor shaping language development. Accordingly, the parent-child reading practices characterizing the home literacy environment (HLE) offer rich potential to boost and diversify language input and exposure in early childhood, especially if parents use shared reading experiences to spark conversational dialogue around novel concepts. To date, it remains unclear how shared reading experiences may promote language interaction and development in early childhood for late talker children. Furthermore, the role of socioeconomic status (SES) in contribution to the relationship between language development and shared book reading interactions in early childhood remains understudied. Therefore, there is a need to further specify characteristics of shared reading practices and SES in relation to parent-child conversational interactions and child language abilities in early childhood. METHOD: 33 parent-child dyads (all mothers) of children classified as either late talkers (n = 15, 8 male) or typical controls (n=18, 9 male) were selected from an ongoing larger longitudinal study of language delay in collaboration with researchers at Northwestern University (PIs: Norton and Wakschlaug). Characteristics of parent-child conversational interactions during story book reading were assessed through language transcription and subsequent analysis of the quality and quantity of parent language input during these interactions. Parent language input measures and SES were evaluated for possible group differences between late talkers and typical controls, and subsequently examined as potential predictors of language status. RESULTS: Parental language input during shared book reading significantly differed among dyads of late talkers compared to typical controls, as indicated by mean length of utterance (MLU) in words, MLU in morphemes, moving average type token ratio (TTR), and number of different words. SES differences in parent education were also identified between groups. MLU in morphemes was found to significantly contribute to the prediction of language status in toddlerhood. CONCLUSION: Results suggest that the proximal factor of parent language input quality may be a more salient predictor of language development than the distal factors of SES for late talker children in particular. Findings highlight modifiable factors such as high-quality parent language input and shared book reading that have the potential to facilitate positive language outcomes for this population. These findings may lead to better guidance for adjustments that can be made within the HLE to improve language outcomes for late talker children.