Effects of phonological awareness and semantic intervention on word-learning in children with SLI

Abstract

This study examined the effects of phonological awareness and semantic intervention on word-learning abilities in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and whether treatment order influenced outcomes. An alternating treatment design was implemented to evaluate whether phonological awareness, semantic awareness, or a combination of both interventions positively influenced children's word-learning ability and whether the order of the treatments influenced outcomes. Nineteen children with SLI, aged between 6;3 and 8;2 years, and 19 age-matched children with typical language development participated in this study. The children with SLI were randomly assigned either to treatment condition A (phonological awareness intervention followed by semantic intervention) or treatment condition B (same interventions in reverse order). A word-learning paradigm was applied at pre-, mid-, and post-testing to evaluate which condition accelerated the receptive and expressive learning of novel words. Positive treatment effects on producing new words were found for the children who received phonological awareness intervention followed by semantic intervention. There was no improvement on the comprehension of new words for either group. The findings suggest that phonological awareness intervention may not only improve children's phonological skills, but may help to facilitate some aspects of word-learning when followed by an additional semantic based intervention.

Keywords:

• Word-learning
• Specific Language Impairment (SLI)
• phonological awareness

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the children for their participation in this study and the parents and teachers for their great support. The authors would also like to thank Pat Coope for her statistical support and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

Notes

1. In this paper, children with SLI are referred to children presenting with language skills one or more SDs below the mean for age expectations with nonverbal intelligence skills within normal limits and the absence of any neurological or sensory disorder (Leonard, Miller, & Gerber, 1999; Paradis, 2004). For review purposes, the term SLI will only be used when specified by the authors, otherwise the term language impairment will be utilized.

2. Word-learning test protocols are available on request from the first author.

3. Intervention protocols are available on request from the first author.