The techniques that clinicians use to treat language deficits in SLI children are
increasingly being shaped by the results of intervention studies. In this section,
we examine the findings of some of these studies. Much is now known, for
example, about the factors and methods that can facilitate word learning in SLI
children. Also, aspects of grammar can be successfully targeted during inter-
vention in these children. Word learning and grammatical interventions will be
considered below. Parents play an essential role in any programme of inter-
vention in SLI children. We discuss a technique that parents can use to bring
about morphosyntactic gains in their SLI children. Finally, a successful lan-
guage intervention is one that results in the generalisation of newly acquired
knowledge and skills to untrained domains and contexts. How such generali-
sation can be achieved in the case of SLI children will be considered.Techniques to facilitate word learning in SLI children have been the focus
of a number of intervention studies. Kouri (2005) examined the use of twointeractive treatment approaches to train late-talking preschoolers with SLI in
the production of target vocabulary. In one procedure (mand-elicited imita-
tion), elicitations and imitative prompts were used. In the second procedure,
auditory bombardment and play modelling were adopted and there were no
response demands placed on children. Kouri found that mand-elicited imita-
tion was relatively more effective than auditory bombardment and play model-
ling in facilitating frequency and rate of target word learning in the treatment
setting. However, there were no significant differences between these tech-
niques in the number or percentage of target words generalised to the home
setting. Lexical productivity was balanced across settings in the children who
received mand-elicited imitation, while children who received auditory bom-
bardment and play modelling produced more target words that were restricted
to the home setting. Gray (2005) examined the use of phonological and seman-
tic encoding cues in promoting word learning in SLI children. Twenty-four
preschool SLI children and 24 age- and gender-matched children with normal
language participated in phonological and semantic treatment conditions.
While normal language subjects displayed similar performance across both
conditions, SLI children comprehended more words in the semantic condition
and produced more words in the phonological condition. Gray also found that
normal language subjects required significantly fewer trials than SLI subjects
to produce words in the semantic condition and to comprehend words in the
semantic and phonological conditions. This confirms the findings of other
studies that have demonstrated a significant effect of frequency of presentation
on word learning (see Riches et al. (2005) and Gray (2003) in section 4.4.2).