The use of priming and recasts (Wada et al., 2020)

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the use of structural priming combined with a focused recasting procedure to elicit subject- and object-focused, center-embedded relative clauses from students with developmental language disorders (DLDs) and typically developing (TD) students.

Method: A total of 26 children (13 DLD, 13 TD), ranging in age from 6;10 to 10;11 (years;months), participated in this study. All children completed a priming and recasting task that targeted subject- and object-focused relatives. The stimuli were presented in two blocks, which each contained 40 trials for each sentence type.

Results: Children with DLD and their TD peers were significantly more accurate producing subject-focused than object-focused relatives. An analysis of rate of learning indicated that significantly more trials were required for subjects in the DLD group to demonstrate consistent performance on both subject- and object-focused relatives.

Conclusions: The study supports the feasibility of combining an implicit priming task with an explicit recasting task for teaching subject-focused relative clauses to children with DLD. However, it is likely that additional instruction and/or more trials will be necessary for children with DLD to attain consistent performance levels.

Supplemental Material S1. Subject-focused stimuli and object-focused stimuli.

Wada, R., Gillam, S. L., & Gillam, R. B. (2020). The use of structural priming and focused recasts to facilitate the production of subject- and object-focused relative clauses by school-age children with and without developmental language disorder. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_AJSLP-19-00090