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Background: Morphosyntactic problems are a core symptom of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). In the Netherlands, children with (presumed) DLD can receive special care in language-focused treatment groups. The focus of these groups mainly lies in improving communicative intentions, vocabulary and phonology. Morphosyntactic skills receive less attention., Aims: The authors developed a scripted group-based intervention targeting morphosyntactic skills in young children with DLD. In this study, the effect of the intervention on the morphosyntactic skills of preschoolers with (presumed) DLD was tested and the usability for pedagogical practitioners (PPs) was evaluated., Methods & Procedures: Twenty-seven preschoolers with DLD (aged 2;10-3;10 [years;months]) participated in an A-B group study in which the development of grammatical structures was monitored with a morphosyntactic task and language sample analyses (LSA). Progression during 8 weeks usual care (UC) and 8 weeks morphosyntactic intervention was examined using Bayesian mixed effects models. In LSA, structures that were targeted were compared to control structures. The intervention consisted of a weekly script-based group session in which morphosyntactic structures were targeted, and daily activities in which these target structures were repeated. The intervention was provided by trained PPs, who were coached by a speech-language therapist. An early indication of usability and feasibility was evaluated using an online questionnaire., Outcomes & Results: The analyses show that morphosyntactic skills improved during the intervention period, with strong evidence for growth in the production of target structures on the morphosyntactic task and target and control structures in LSA, while barely any evidence was found for growth in the use of these structures in UC. However, target structures and control structures seem to develop at the same rate. General measures of morphosyntactic ability showed improvement both during UC and the intervention phase. Evaluation among practitioners suggested that the intervention is regarded as usable and feasible., Conclusions & Implications: Growth in morphosyntactic skills of children in the intervention period was demonstrated, but this could not be proven to be related to the intervention because both target and control structures improved during the intervention. This growth might be due to maturation instead of the intervention. Nevertheless, our study demonstrates that the morphosyntactic skills of preschoolers with DLD can show considerable improvement over a period of 8 weeks. Furthermore, our study underlines the importance of using LSA measures when monitoring the morphosyntactic development of children, as they might be more sensitive to change than standardised tests., What This Paper Adds: What is already known on the subject Most children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) experience difficulties in their morphosyntactic development. In the Netherlands, preschoolers with DLD can receive special care in language-focused treatment groups. These groups mainly focus on stimulating communicative intentions, vocabulary and phonology, but less so on stimulating morphosyntactic skills. What this study adds We designed a new group-based intervention targeting the expressive morphosyntactic skills of children with DLD, examined the effect and investigated the usability and feasibility. Although there is strong evidence for growth in morphological skills, intervention effects could not be demonstrated. Evaluations among practitioners suggested that the intervention is regarded as usable and feasible. Furthermore, this study shows that children's morphosyntactic skills can improve over relatively short periods of time and language sample analyses seem to be sensitive to detect these changes. What are the clinical implications of this work? Currently, very few group-based morphosyntactic interventions exist (in the Netherlands). Since practitioners were generally positive about the intervention and its usability and feasibility, the proposed intervention might benefit the treatment of morphosyntactic problems in children with DLD., (© 2024 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.)

Background: While narrative tasks have proven to be valid measures for detecting language disorders, measuring communicative skills and predicting future academic performance, research into the comparability of different narrative tasks has shown that outcomes are dependent on the type of task used. Although many of the studies detecting task differences touch upon the fact that tasks place differential demands on cognitive abilities like auditory attention and memory, few studies have related specific narrative tasks to these cognitive abilities. Examining this relation is especially warranted for children with specific language impairment (SLI), who are characterized by language problems, but often have problems in other cognitive domains as well., Methods & Procedures: In the current research, a comparison was made between a story retelling task (The Bus Story) and a story generation task (The Frog Story) in a group of children with SLI (n= 34) and a typically developing group (n= 38) from the same age range. In addition to the two narrative tasks, sustained auditory attention (TEA-Ch) and verbal working memory (WISC digit span and the Dutch version of the CVLT-C word list recall) were measured. Correlations were computed between the narrative, the memory and the attention scores., Outcomes & Results: A group comparison showed that the children with SLI scored significantly worse than the typically developing children on several narrative measures as well as on sustained auditory attention and verbal working memory. A within-subjects comparison of the scores on the two narrative tasks showed a contrast between the tasks on several narrative measures. Furthermore, correlational analyses showed that, on the level of plot structure, the story generation task correlated with sustained auditory attention, while the story retelling task correlated with word list recall. Mean length of utterance (MLU) on the other hand correlated with digit span but not with sustained auditory attention., Conclusions: While children with SLI have problems with narratives in general, their performance is also dependent on the specific elicitation task used for research or diagnostics. Various narrative tasks generate different scores and are differentially correlated to cognitive skills like attention and memory, making the selection of a given task crucial in the clinical setting., (© 2012 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.)