Developmental Considerations in the Management of Language Disabled Children

Abstract

Since recent work in the study of normal language acquisition has suggested that children initially acquire basic grammatical relations which reflect important perceptions in the child's environment, a preliminary investigation was undertaken in an effort to determine the appropriateness of teaching certain aspects of grammar through a developmental sequence to children with language learning disabilities. Through a counterbalanced design, children were taught the use of grammatical structures (7) with a sequence representing a response hierarchy parelleling the normal child's acquisition of the structure, and (2) with a sequence with a response hierarchy based on increasing length. Results indicated significantly greater post-training use of the grammatical structures with the developmental sequence. In addition, the general success of the employed teaching approach suggested that certain children may have difficulty treating perceived structures as significant features of language and incorporating such features into their speech.

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