Investigating the Effects of Adding Explicit Teaching and/or Signing to Story-Based Vocabulary Intervention for School-Aged Children With (Developmental) Language Disorder.

International journal of language & communication disorders · 2026 · RCT · SLP
Lucy Hughes, Cécile Larralde, Hilary Nicoll, Nataša Marić, Caroline Burke, Susan Ebbels

Adding explicit teaching or signing to story-based vocabulary lessons helped school-aged children with DLD learn more verbs and adjectives than stories alone. Combining both added no extra benefit and may have slightly hindered learning.

Key findings

1

On the primary outcome (word definitions), all four conditions produced gains, but the three conditions that added explicit teaching, signing, or both to the story produced greater progress than the story-only reference condition, with 100% probability of a positive effect.

2

Combining explicit teaching and signing did not produce greater gains than either component alone; the data suggested the combined condition may even have led to slightly less progress, though the evidence was not strong enough to confirm this.

3

On the secondary outcome (sentence generation), the same pattern held: all conditions improved, and the three experimental conditions showed greater progress than the reference condition, with probabilities of 90% to 94%.

MethodologyResultsClinical Relevance

Single-blind randomized controlled trial. Sixty-four participants were randomized across two intervention arms and assessed at twelve weeks for the primary outcome…

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Summarised by AI from the abstract, not the full paper. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed