The emergence of clause construction in children who use speech generating devices.
Gat Savaldi-Harussi, Lyle Lustigman, Gloria Soto
PMID 31070060WHAT IT FOUND
Four children using speech generating devices produced longer, more complex clauses over 10 months.
They first used simple subject-verb-object clauses, then added pronouns, inflections, articles and prepositions. More adult-supported turns were associated with more grammatical clauses.
Key findings
01Over the 10-month period, the highest complexity score for each observation increased over time for all four children.
02All participants began with simple subject-verb-object clauses and later added elements such as adjectives, pronouns, connectives, negation and quantifiers.
03Clauses co-constructed across multiple turns were more likely to be grammatically correct, and the relationship between complexity and number of turns was positive across all participants.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The analysis included only four children, and three of them produced fewer than 50 clause constructions, which the paper says is below a reliable sample size. There was no control group or comparison condition, so changes over time cannot be separated from maturation, practice, or the original intervention. The paper analyses four of the eight participants from the larger study but does not report why the other four were excluded or how many dropped out. The familiar adults varied in AAC training and received no instructions about conversation topics, so adult support was not standardised. Prestored phrases were excluded from the syntactic analysis, and the time spent in each co-construction sequence was not analysed. The syntactic complexity score was developed for this study and needs further reliability testing. The reported correlations were modest, and the paper's per-participant significance statement is inconsistent because Participant A is listed with p = .26.
Declared interests
The supplied text does not report author conflicts of interest or funding. The publication types indicate NIH extramural research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that the intervention caused the clause gains. The children also used their own speech-generating devices and conversed with familiar adults, and the current analysis followed only four children without a control group.