Does interactive book reading help children with developmental language disorder (DLD) learn new words?

Abstract

This study evaluated the efficacy of interactive book reading on word learning in terms of naming and definition in 4 children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Through interactive book reading, each child received 36 exposures for each target word. A namingsentence task and a definition task were used to obtain multiple baselines within each child, in order to evaluate treatment and maintenance effects. In terms of word naming, two children showed large treatment effects in one treatment block. They could maintain their performance in naming. All children could name more of the same target words in the naming-story than in the naming-sentence task. In terms of word definition, all children showed large treatment effects in both treatment blocks. All children also demonstrated maintenance effects. Generalization effect of word meaning was also evaluated. Only two children demonstrated some generalization of the target word meaning to a novel word that shares a same morpheme. Results suggest that interactive book reading promotes the learning of word meaning more than the learning of word form, and that word forms are more easily produced in the learning context compared to new contexts. Also, interactive book reading may not encourage generalization of word meaning.