Exploring Explicit Intervention to Target Grammatical Forms With Spanish-English Bilingual Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Speech-language pathologists have limited evidence-based methods for grammar intervention to use with multilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Explicit grammatical intervention is a promising approach for this population and has the potential to facilitate cross-linguistic transfer to an untreated language. In this clinical focus article, we present steps for implementing a grammatical language intervention for bilingual children that integrates explicit connections between a child's languages and examine evidence of a treatment effect. METHOD Three 4- to 8-year-old Spanish-English speaking children with DLD participated in a single-subject nonconcurrent multiple-baseline design study. The participants received an explicit-based grammatical intervention in English, adapted to promote cross-linguistic transfer to Spanish, targeting regular past tense and present tense forms. We describe how each step in the intervention could be adapted and implemented by monolingual clinicians. RESULTS Participants showed preliminary evidence of a positive treatment effect on English -ed and -s, with varying degrees of transfer to corresponding Spanish grammatical measures. CONCLUSIONS This is the first investigation of an explicit-based grammatical language treatment involving Spanish-English bilingual children with DLD. With careful design and planning, this approach has the potential for providing benefits in the child's untreated first language by drawing on metalinguistic strengths and cross-linguistic similarities.