Colourful semantics: A clinical investigation

Abstract

Children with language difficulties often omit verbs and grammatical elements and fail to complete sentences. Bryan (1997) described ‘colourful semantics’, a therapy she used to treat a 5-year-old boy. The therapy uses colour coding to highlight the predicate argument structure of sentences. This study further tested the therapy’s effectiveness by assessing the progress of six 5- and 6-year-olds receiving it under clinical conditions. The children were assessed on the Renfrew Action Picture Test (RAPT), the Bus Story, the Test of the Reception of Grammar (TROG) and an informal verb assessment. They were assessed again after a 9-week baseline without therapy and then treated twice weekly for 8 weeks after which a final assessment was carried out. A clinician who did not know the children conducted the second and third assessments. RAPT information and grammar scores and the Bus Story information and mean sentence length scores all improved during therapy but not in the baseline. These results obtained under clinical conditions are encouraging and warrant a larger study of this approach.