Ten Principles of Grammar Facilitation For Children With Specific Language Impairments
Ten Principles of Grammar Facilitation For Children With Specific Language Impairments
Ten Principles of Grammar Facilitation For Children With Specific Language Impairments
Marc E. Fey
University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City
Steven H. Long
Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI
Lizbeth H. Finestack
University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City
Although they often have significant difficulties to present and justify 10 principles that we regard
in other areas, most children with specific as essential for planning adequate interventions
language impairment (SLI) have special difficul- for children with language-learning problems.
ties with the understanding and use of grammar. These principles are relevant for all children with
Therefore, most of these children will require an problems in the use of grammar, but they are
intervention program that targets comprehension especially appropriate for 3- to 8-year-old
or production of grammatical form. Language children with SLI. Although all of our examples
interventionists are faced with the difficult task of are from English, the principles we have chosen
developing comprehensive intervention pro- are sufficiently broad to cut across many
grams that address the children’s grammatical linguistic and cultural boundaries.
deficits while remaining sensitive to their other
existing and predictable social, behavioral, and Key Words: specific language impairment,
academic problems. The purpose of this article is language intervention, grammar
C
ompared to their age-level peers, children with Although linguistic functions are most severely dis-
specific language impairment (SLI) may have turbed, children with SLI also have been shown to perform
deficits in any or all domains of language (Bishop, poorly on many tasks of cognitive functioning, including
1992; Johnston, 1988; Leonard, 1998). This includes symbolic play, haptic recognition, temporal processing of
phonology (Leonard, 1982; Roberts, Rescorla, Giroux, & auditory and visual signals, and mental rotation. Several of
Stevens, 1998), lexical and relational semantics (Ellis these tasks do not appear to reflect underlying verbal
Weismer & Hesketh, 1996; Kail & Leonard, 1986; Leonard abilities (see Johnston, 1994). These children also are
et al., 1982; Leonard, 1975; McGregor & Leonard, 1995; reported frequently to be generally clumsy or slow and to
McGregor & Waxman, 1998; Oetting, Rice, & Swank, 1995; have problems on visual discrimination tasks (Miller, Kail,
Schwartz & Leonard, 1985), syntax (Fletcher, 1992; Leonard, & Tomblin, 2001; Powell & Bishop, 1992;
Morehead & Ingram, 1973), morphology (Bedore & Windsor & Hwang, 1999).
Leonard, 1998; Leonard, 1989; Leonard & Bortolini, 1998; The language impairments of children with SLI
Leonard, Bortolini, Caselli, & Sabbadini, 1993; Miller & typically are noted first in conversational contexts during
Leonard, 1998; Rice, 1994; Rice, Buhr, & Nemeth, 1990), the preschool years. They also manifest themselves in
and pragmatics (Brinton, Fujiki, & Higbee, 1998; Brinton, older children in the comprehension and production of
Fujiki, & McKee, 1998; Craig, 1991; Craig & Evans, 1993). textual forms, such as narrative and exposition, in both
These problems exist in the absence of mental retardation or spoken and written modalities (Gillam, McFadden, & van
of frank neurological, sensory, or psychosocial factors that Kleeck, 1995; Liles, Duffy, Merritt, & Purcell, 1995; Scott,
might adequately explain the extreme difficulties these 1995). Because of their verbal and nonverbal deficits,
children exhibit in language acquisition and development. children with language impairments are at great risk for
American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology • Vol. 12 • 3–15 • February 2003 • © American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
Fey et al.: Grammar Facilitation 3
1058-0360/03/1201-0003
school failure. For example, they may have problems in this article is to present 10 principles that we regard as
social and behavioral adjustment in school (Beitchman et essential in developing state-of-the-art grammatical
al., 1986; Brinton, Fujiki, Campbell Spencer, & Robinson, interventions for children with SLI and to offer some
1997; Brinton, Fujiki, & Higbee, 1998; Brinton, Fujiki, & examples of how those principles might be implemented
McKee, 1998; Redmond & Rice, 1998; Rice, 1993; clinically. These principles are listed in Table 1.
Windsor, 1995). They are also highly likely to have Our own theoretical position on SLI is most consistent
problems in learning to read and write (Catts, 1991, 1993; with general processing limitation hypotheses, such as the
Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 2001; Fey, Catts, & so-called surface account of Leonard (1998). Leonard’s
Larrivee, 1995; Padget, 1988). hypothesis holds that children with SLI develop adult-like
Despite investigators’ awareness of deficits in many representations of morphosyntactic forms more slowly than
different areas of linguistic and nonlinguistic functioning, do children with typical language because they are gener-
use of grammar clearly has received the most theoretical ally slow in processing of language and other types of
and empirical attention to date. This focus on grammar information and sensory–motor operations (Leonard, 1998;
and, especially, grammatical morphology is well deserved, Miller et al., 2001). Their problems with language are more
because this is the one area in which developmental significant than deficits in other areas because of the rapid
patterns of children with SLI have been shown to differ sensory, perceptual, and computational processing required
consistently from those of younger, typically developing for language acquisition. According to this view, language
children who are matched on some linguistic criterion, difficulties should be greatest for language forms that are
such as mean length of utterance (MLU; Leonard, 1994, weak in phonetic form, sparsely or irregularly represented
1998; Rice & Wexler, 1996; Rice, Wexler, & Hershberger, on the surface, opaque with respect to their underlying
1998). The profile of atypical syntax and morphology semantic properties, and/or complex with respect to their
learning is characterized by late onset of grammatical linguistic computational requirements. For English-
forms and by protracted periods from first uses to mastery speaking children, this includes virtually all bound and free
of these same forms (Johnston & Schery, 1976; Rice et al., grammatical morphology. Not all morphemes should pose
1998). Thus, at the same time that children with SLI are the same degree of difficulty for children with SLI,
omitting grammatical morphemes, such as articles, however, because not all grammatical morphemes are
copulas, auxiliaries, and regular tense inflections, they may
occasionally use sentences that are longer and syntactically
more complex than those commonly found among younger TABLE 1. Ten principles of grammatical intervention for
children with SLI.
typical children at the same stage of morphological
development (Johnston & Kamhi, 1984; Leonard, 1972).
Because of the pervasiveness of delays in grammar and 1. The basic goal of all grammatical interventions should be
to help the child to achieve greater facility in the
the especially slow development of grammatical morphol- comprehension and use of syntax and morphology in the
ogy among children with SLI, language interventionists service of conversation, narration, exposition, and other
frequently are called upon to develop language intervention textual genres in both written and oral modalities.
programs to facilitate grammatical development in these 2. Grammatical form should rarely, if ever, be the only
children. Although this task appears circumscribed on the aspect of language and communication that is targeted
surface, it is always far more complex in reality. We in a language intervention program.
believe that effective intervention requires clinicians to 3. Select intermediate goals in an effort to stimulate the
follow four steps. They must carefully (a) examine the child’s language acquisition processes rather than to
teach specific language forms.
child’s existing speech and language patterns, (b) evaluate
4. The specific goals of grammatical intervention must be
the linguistic knowledge presumed to underlie those based on the child’s “functional readiness” and need for
patterns, (c) evaluate the impact of these patterns on the the targeted forms.
child’s current social–behavioral–cognitive performance, 5. Manipulate the social, physical, and linguistic context to
and (d) evaluate the potential impact of the child’s existing create more frequent opportunities for grammatical
speech and language problems on future deficits in targets.
language, social, academic, and cognitive development, 6. Exploit different textual genres and the written modality
and behavioral adjustment. Failure to consider this broad to develop appropriate contexts for specific intervention
assortment of factors can oversimplify the problem for the targets.
child, the child’s family, and the interventionist. Interven- 7. Manipulate the discourse so that targeted features are
rendered more salient in pragmatically felicitous
tion based on such oversimplification is not likely to serve contexts.
what we regard as the primary purpose or basic goal of
8. Systematically contrast forms used by the child with
language intervention: to facilitate communication func- more mature forms from the adult grammar, using
tioning and to minimize the existing or potential social, sentence recasts.
behavioral, and academic penalties associated with 9. Avoid telegraphic speech, always presenting gram-
children’s language deficits (Fey et al., 1995). matical models in well-formed phrases and sentences.
One problem confronting language interventionists, 10. Use elicited imitation to make target forms more salient
then, is how best to facilitate the child’s development of and to give the child practice with phonological patterns
grammar in a manner that is mindful of other problems the that are difficult to access or produce.
child has or can be projected to develop. The purpose of
Erratum
In the November 2002 issue of AJLSP, the article, “Typical and Atypical Language Devel-
opment in Infants and Toddlers Adopted From Eastern Europe,” by Sharon Glennen and M.
Gay Masters, contained errors in Table 3 (p. 105). Under the heading Expressive Vocabulary,
the +/– SD values for ages 22–24 months should have been 8.6–126.66 and the values for ages
25–27 months should have been 12.25–110.93.
We regret any inconvenience or confusion that this misprint may have caused.
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