This study was aimed at clarifying the effects of sibling involvement in a functioanl language intervention concerning semantic, morphological, and pragmatic aspects of language and overall language abilities in children with language disorders.
Ten ...
This study was aimed at clarifying the effects of sibling involvement in a functioanl language intervention concerning semantic, morphological, and pragmatic aspects of language and overall language abilities in children with language disorders.
Ten subjects were selected and assigned into two groups (functional language intervention group with sibilng involvement, and functional language intervention without sibiling involvement. Group 1 (n=10) consists of 5 children with language disorders. Group 2 consists of 5 children with language disorders without sibiling involvement. To investigate the language and communication ability, four examanation tools were administered: Preschool Language Scale, Picture Vocabulary Test, Sentence Comprehension Test, and Language Comprehension and Congnition Test. The subjects's spontaneous speech sample were analyzed. To compare pre-treatment with post-treatment between two the groups, repeated-measures ANOVA and t-test were used. In the language intervention, acrivirties consisted of group time, playing riddles time.
The results were as follows;
First, the functional language intervention with sibling involvement was more effevtive compared to without sibling involvement in improning the semantic aspects of language of children with langauge disorders. There was no significant differnce between pre-treatment and post-treatment in the Type-Token Ratio of two the groups. However, there was a significant difference between pre-treatment and post-treatment in the number of semantic relations between the two groups in that group 1 showed a higher improvement than group 2.
Second, the functional language intervention with sibling involvement was more effective compared to language of children with language disorders. There was a significant difference between pre-treatment and post-treatment in the mean length of utterance(MLU) of the two groups.However there was no significant difference between in the post-treatment between the groups.
Third, tje functional language intervention with sibling involvement was more effective in improving pragmatic aspects of language of children with language disorders. There was a signigicant difference between pre-treatment and post-treatment in the number of communicative intentions of the two groups. And there was a sigvificant difference in the post-treatment betwenn the groups in that group 1 showed a higher improvement than group 2.
Forth, the functional language intervention with sibling involvement was more effective compared to without sibling involvement in improving the overall language abilities of children with language disorder. There was a signigicant difference between pre-treatment and post-treatment in the overall language abilities of the two groups. However, there was no signigicant difference in the post-treatment between the two groups. Therefore, language sample analyses seemed to be more sensitive than language tests to identify overall language sbilities in children with language disorders.
As described above, the functional language intervention with sibling involvement was effective in improving the language abilitied of children with language disorders.