Sentences Are Key: Helping School-Age Children and Adolescents Build Sentence Skills Needed for Real Language.

Purpose: In this article, we present key concepts pointing to the importance of targeting complex sentences for school-age children and adolescents with developmental language disorders (DLD). Drawing on current treatment research, we argue that the sentence is a crucial but often neglected piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding relationships between DLD and academic outcomes. We provide detailed suggestions for how clinicians can focus on complex sentence structures in natural academic contexts to bridge this gap.

Explicit Grammatical Intervention for Developmental Language Disorder: Three Approaches.

Purpose This article summarizes the shared principles and evidence underpinning methods employed in the three sentence-level (syntactic) grammatical intervention approaches developed by the authors. We discuss associated clinical resources and map a way forward for clinically useful research in this area. Method We provide an overview of the principles and perspectives that are common across our three syntactic intervention approaches: MetaTaal (Zwitserlood, 2015; Zwitserlood, Wijnen, et al.

Targeting Complex Sentences in Older School Children With Specific Language Impairment: Results From an Early-Phase Treatment Study.

Purpose: This study investigated the effects of a complex sentence treatment at 2 dosage levels on language performance of 30 school-age children ages 10-14 years with specific language impairment.

Method: Three types of complex sentences (adverbial, object complement, relative) were taught in sequence in once or twice weekly dosage conditions. Outcome measures included sentence probes administered at baseline, treatment, and posttreatment phases and comparisons of pre-post performance on oral and written language tests and tasks.

The Grammar of Information: Challenges for Older Students With Language Impairments.

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to describe the nature of informational (expository) language in terms of unique grammatical characteristics and discuss applications for assessment and intervention for older school-age children and adolescents with language impairments.

Methods: Information presented is based on a selected literature review of topics including the nature of academic texts, expository text processing of older children and adolescents with language impairments and/or learning disabilities, and language intervention studies that target higher level language in the same populations.

Results: We summarize key grammatical strategies found in informational text: (1) complex nominal (noun phrase) groups, (2) clausal subordination, and (3) theme and information mechanisms.

The word length effect in children with language impairment.

Unlabelled: Two types of serial word recall tasks (full verbal recall and probed recall) were administered to 11 children with language impairment and 22 language-normal children matched for productive language or chronological age. The methods were designed to take into account age-related differences in the use of subvocal rehearsal, as measured by the word length effect. The word length effect was significant for all three groups in full recall, but not in probed recall, supporting the hypothesis that children with language impairment demonstrate limited capacity for processing verbal output.