Systematic language input improved productions of elaborated verb phrases of Cantonese-speaking children with language difficulties

ABSTRACT

It has been well-documented that language input designed according to the principles of statistical learning can promote language acquisition among children with or without language disorder. Cantonese-speaking children with language disorder were reported to have difficulties using expanded verb phrases and prepositional phrases, but the corresponding intervention is relatively unexplored. The current study evaluated the efficacy of an intervention designed using the statistical learning principles to promote the acquisition of these two structures. A retrospective study of existing data collected from a total of 16 Cantonese-speaking children (four female; mean age = 6.70 years) with suspected language disorder was conducted. The participants were initially divided into the ‘Treatment’ and the ‘Control’ groups. A total of eight sessions of language treatment, which focused on giving systematic language input of expanded verb phrases and prepositional phrases, were conducted on each child. Results showed that the Treatment group produced significantly more expanded verb phrases in the post-treatment language samples, while the Control group did not. The final pre- and post-comparison conducted after the Control group also received treatment indicated overall significant increased number of expanded verb phrases produced across time. On the contrary, improvement in the production of prepositional phrases was not significant. It is suggested that the unique thematic roles coded by individual prepositions possibly restricted the generalisation effect of treatment, which explains the non-significant improvement across time. Theoretical and clinical implications were discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Language difficulties
• language intervention
• Cantonese
• elaborated verb phrases
• prepositional phrases

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr Angel Chan for her invaluable suggestions to revise the manuscript. We would like to express the gratitude to all the student clinicians participated in the data collection and intervention conduction. Last but not least, acknowledgment is also given to all the participants, who were willing to spend hours of time for the study without any monetary compensation.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Ethics statement

This study involving human participants was reviewed and approved by the Human Subjects Ethics Sub-committee of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HSEARS20220522002). The patients/participants provided written informed consent to participate in this study.

Notes

¹ As described in the Method section, the participants of the current study were reported to have language difficulties, despite having sufficient language exposures, that result in negative impact on their social communication and academic performance. That the children were entering into school age with unresolved language difficulties also indicated relatively poor prognosis. In light of the CALALISE framework (Bishop et al., 2017), the participants of the current study should be regarded as children with language disorder. Nevertheless, these participants were seen by student clinicians during COVID times when the student clinicians could only rely on non norm-referenced language assessments and informal speech and language assessments in tele-therapy online sessions without normative data to substantiate their lack of age-appropriate language competence in their L1 best language. The student clinicians were not allowed to use the Cantonese norm-referenced language assessment tests in telepractice, even after our speech therapy unit had liaised with the test publisher (Department of Health of the HKSAR government) as the test publisher had concerns about leakage of test questions during online testing. Given that the children’s language problems were not formally diagnosed using norm-referenced assessment, it is decided that a more conservative term ‘suspected language disorder’ should be used in this article.