Some Structures are Learned more Easily than Others: Analysing non-corrective recasts for children with DLD

• Anna Koppy, Linguistics, University of Delaware

• Amanda Owen Van Horne, Communication Sciences & Disorders, University of Delaware

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulty learning language without an obvious cause for this difficulty. Recasting, a technique in which an adult restates a child’s utterance using the target form to highlight the structural parts of language (e.g., suffixes) has been shown to be an effective treatment approach for the child. However, recasting places heavy cognitive demands on the adult speaker because they must maintain high levels of control of their own utterances. Recasting is more effective when the child with DLD is exposed to many examples on a variety of different words (Plante et al. 2014). However, when teaching harder sentences (passives/object relatives), these high frequency/high variability recasting strategies appear to be of mixed use. Using existing data from our ongoing treatment study, I coded sessions from 10 adult-child dyads from object relative clause treatments and 8 dyads from passive treatments. I analyzed the instances of each sentence type used, with the goal of describing what leads to better learning. Ultimately, we find that passive recasts have more surface level similarity across examples which leads to greater transparency in the pattern and make it easier for kids to extract the passive pattern. Object relatives, on the other hand, have fewer consistent markers to signal to the child that the structure is special and because adults tend to follow general production patterns, less common cues are not consistently produced. This suggests that high variability/high frequency treatment methods would be effective for syntactic structures with features more similar on the surface level from example to example but for more opaque structures, like the object relative clause, the learning process may require more intentional scaffolding and a conversational recast therapy treatment approach will not be the most effective choice.