Treatment Efficacy of Combined Dialogic Reading and Scripting for a Child with Moderate to Severe Communication Impairment

Even though children with moderate to severe communication impairments develop some spoken language, they have difficulty using multiple utterances that are connected by a unitary thought or discourse. Dialogic reading and scripting interventions have previously been shown to be separately effective in increasing the semantic and syntactic skills of children with language impairments. This single-subject study evaluated the use of an intervention that incorporated elements of both of these approaches, using adapted books that included sequenced activities of daily living, to increase the use of procedural discourse by a twelve-year-old child with Down syndrome. The intervention was successful in increasing the child's ability to produce coherent multi-word utterances and the number of steps to describe procedural sequences. The child's number of total words and number of different words in the context of the activities also increased. Gains were still evident 5 months post-treatment with an unfamiliar communication partner.

Name thesis:degree_name

MS

Level thesis:degree_level

Immediate Access

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Speech-Language Pathology (SLP)

Year dc:date.available

2013

Author dc:creator

• Horvath, Brittany Marie

Contributors dc:contributor

• Diane Williams
• Lori Marra
• Heather Rusiewicz

• Activities of daily living
• Dialogic book reading
• Down syndrome
• Moderate to severe communication impairments
• Procedural sequence
• Scripts

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/663

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dsc.duq.edu:etd-1679