Learning Verbs in Sentences: Children With Developmental Language Disorder and the Role of Retrieval Practice.
Laurence B Leonard, Patricia Deevy, Sharon L Christ and 3 others
PMID 39361832WHAT IT FOUND
Retrieval practice helped children with DLD recall new verbs in practiced sentences, but this advantage disappeared after one week.
They also struggled to use these verbs in new grammatical structures, unlike their typical peers.
Key findings
01Children with DLD recalled more novel verbs in the retrieval practice condition immediately after learning, but this advantage over repeated study was no longer significant one week later.
02Children with DLD could not use retrieval practice to help them apply new verbs to a different sentence structure, showing no benefit over simple repetition.
03Half of the children with DLD failed to change the verb form (e.g., keeping -ing) when asked to use it in a new syntactic structure.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used only eight novel verbs, which may not represent the complexity of learning a large vocabulary of real verbs. The children were taught in a controlled laboratory setting, which differs from the distractions of a clinical room or classroom. The sample size was small (14 children with DLD), limiting the generalisability of the findings. The authors speculate that the DLD group's improvement in the 'repeated study' condition at one week was due to the practice they received during the 5-minute test, but this mechanism was not directly measured.
Declared interests
The study was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT06001866) and approved by the authors' institutional review board. No specific commercial funding or conflicts of interest are mentioned in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that retrieval practice leads to durable or flexible verb learning for children with DLD. The benefit of retrieval practice over simple repetition disappeared after one week, and it did not help these children use the verbs in new sentence structures.