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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:canterbury.ac.nz/oai:ir.canterbury.ac.nz:10092/10061 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Moyle, Charmain Larnay |
| Publisher | University of Canterbury. Communication Disorders |
| Source Sets | University of Canterbury |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic thesis or dissertation, Text |
| Rights | Copyright Charmain Larnay Moyle, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml |
| Relation | NZCU |
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