Language Intervention Strategies Study Guide

Language Intervention Study Guide

• Language intervention strategies, such as self-talk and parallel talk, enhance language development in children with delays, ASD, and speech disorders.
• Self-talk: Adults describe their own actions while engaging in an activity, connecting words to actions, and encouraging vocabulary and sentence structure. An example is: "I'm building a tower. I put a red block. Oops! It fell!".
• Parallel talk: Adults narrate a child's actions instead of their own, increasing word-object associations and conversation turns. An example is: "You're rolling the car. It's going fast! Now it stopped."
• Expansions: Child-centered language intervention where an adult reformulates a child's incomplete or grammatically simple utterance into a more mature sentence. For example: Child: "Doggy house." Adult: "The doggy is in the house." This enhances grammatical development and promotes spontaneous speech and grammatical development.
• Extensions: Commentaries that add new semantic information to a child's utterance, unlike expansions which focus on correcting grammar. For example: Child: "Doggy house." Adult: "Yes, he went inside because it was cold." This increases sentence length and encourages richer conversational skills.
• Buildups/Breakdowns: A language intervention technique to help children understand sentence construction. The technique involves building up a child's simple utterance into a full sentence, and then breaking it down into smaller phrase-sized segments before rebuilding it. This allows children to understand sentence construction.
• Recasts: A language intervention technique where an adult repeats a child's utterance with grammatical modifications. This helps improve grammatical development while maintaining the child's original intent. Example: Child: "Doggy house" Adult: "Is the doggy in the house?" or "The doggy is not in the house."

Focused Stimulation

• RE/PMT is an early intervention approach to improve prelinguistic communication skills in young children with language delays, ASD, or developmental disabilities.
• Two components: Prelinguistic Milieu Teaching (PMT) and Responsivity Education (RE). PMT focuses on increasing the frequency, clarity, and complexity of nonverbal communication acts. RE trains parents or caregivers to respond effectively to the child's communicative attempts, enabling communication development.

Enhanced Milieu Teaching (EMT)

• EMT is a naturalistic language intervention designed to promote functional communication in everyday contexts.
• EMT combines Milieu Teaching (MT) strategies with Responsive Interaction (RI) techniques to support language development.
• It involves structured play and social interactions to improve communication.

Emergent Literacy

• Emergent literacy refers to the early skills, knowledge, and attitudes that precede and develop into conventional reading and writing abilities.
• Include print awareness, phonological awareness, letter knowledge, vocabulary, narrative skills, and writing development.
• It is crucial to encourage children's exposure to print, oral language, and story concepts before formal instruction.

Cultural Differences in Narratives

• Different cultures use different narrative structures
• Low-context cultures use linear, topic-centered stories (e.g., U.S.)
• High-context cultures use topic-associated storytelling (e.g., African, Asian).
• Some cultures emphasize oral storytelling, while others focus on concise, well-organized accounts.

Children with Down Syndrome

• Cognitive and physical characteristics (including genetic basis, hypotonia, physical features) impact development.
• Language development is often delayed, particularly expressive language, compared to peers.
• Speech and language difficulties, challenges in social interaction (e.g., reduced eye contact, joint attention, conversational reciprocity), and challenges with figurative language (e.g., understanding sarcasm, idioms, metaphors) can occur.

Children with ASD

• Language development challenges include delayed acquisition, preverbal functioning, and variation in language profiles (ALN vs. ALI).
• Common challenges include articulation delays, difficulties with grammar and syntax, semantic processing issues, atypical speech patterns (e.g., monotone or exaggerated intonation), and challenges in social communication.
• Cognitive and executive functioning difficulties are common, as are sensory processing challenges.

Narrative Skills

• Narrative assessments help identify language impairments. Assessments evaluate personal narratives (recounting personal experiences), script narratives (recounting routine events), and fictional narratives.
• The Story Grammar Model framework (Setting, Problem, Attempt, Consequence, and Resolution) is critical for understanding narratives.
• Effective Strategies for improving comprehension and production include prewriting activities (e.g., drawing, story mapping), questioning techniques, graphic organizers, story retelling and summarization, and self-monitoring.