Vocabulary intervention through storybook reading for children with developmental language disorder

• Published in: Netla
• Main Authors: Sigfúsdóttir, Sigrún Alda, Einarsdóttir, Jóhanna T., Karlsson, Þorlákur, Bergþórsdóttir, Íris Ösp
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Icelandic
• Published: Menntavísindasvið Háskóla Íslands 2020
• Subjects: Language development; developmental language disorder; story book reading; explicit and implicit vocabulary intervention; Bein og óbein orðaforðakennsla; málþroski; málþroskaröskun; lestur sögubóka; Iceland
• Online Access: https://ojs.hi.is/netla/article/view/3187; https://doi.org/10.24270/netla.2020.4

Children diagnosed with developmental language disorders (DLD) have difficulty learning language. This affects both language comprehension and expression and occurs without any obvious explanation. Many children with DLD have coexisting conditions, such as attentional or emotional problems. Children with DLD can have different types of difficulties learning language and the severity varies. The symptoms are numerous, including problems with learning and applying the rules of grammar, sentence construction, and language use. One common symptom is limited vocabulary. Children with DLD have smaller receptive and expressive vocabularies than their peers. They learn new words at slower rate and forget newly acquired words more rapidly. They know fewer words and have weaker semantic connections within their lexical system. This deficit is visible in their expressive language as they often use simple, high frequency vocabulary. This lack of vocabulary diversity can affect their future reading comprehension and academic performance. Research have shown that DLD is common, with approximately 9% of children displaying signs of language impairment without other coexisting difficulties. Considered in the context of the population of Iceland, this means that approximately 400 children in every year-based age group could be affected by DLD.The aim of this project was to examine the effect of an intervention which aimed to increase the vocabulary of two children diagnosed with DLD. Both attended the same preschool and were in their last year in the preschool where the training took place. The training involved reading a story book where two different methods of teaching target words were compared. The words were either (a) explained explicitly and directly when they occurred in the text, or (b) indirectly when the children were exposed to the words in the text but without explicit teaching. A multiple baseline design was employed by comparing the intervention methods between the children. The intervention took place four times ...