Complex syntax intervention for Developmental Language Impairment
Maria Athanatou, Elena Theodorou · ExLing Conferences · 2020
Intervention for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) appears to be beneficial and contributes to sustainable linguistic gains. This paper reports on a pilot intervention study carried out in Cyprus that examined the efficacy of language treatment targeting complex syntactic structures. The language skills of a nine-year-old girl with DLD are evaluated at two distinct time points: immediately before and after the intervention. The child received therapy sessions based on the MetaTaal framework, specifically targeting relative clauses. Post-intervention measurements showed marginal improvement in both the production and comprehension of relative clauses. Notably, more pronounced improvements were observed in a Complex Sentence Repetition Task, suggesting that these complex grammatical structures have begun to emerge in her underlying linguistic system.