2016 Gatlinburg Conference Poster
PS-55
Title: A Comparison of the Efficacy of an Explicit Approach for Teaching Grammatical Forms to Children with ASD or Primary
Language Impairment
Authors: Katherine J. Bangert, Lizbeth H. Finestack
Introduction: There is a subgroup of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) who have significant difficulty mastering
grammatical forms (Robers, Rice, & Tager-Flusberg 2004) ). These grammatical weaknesses are very similar to the weaknesses
expressed by children with primary language impairment (PLI). Despite these well-documented deficits, there is little research
examining intervention approaches for teaching grammatical forms to children with ASD. Moreover, studies of traditional
grammatical interventions for children with PLI reveal that extensive treatment programs result in moderate outcomes (Leonard
et al., 2004; 2006). These traditional interventions rely on implicit approaches, such as modeling and recasting, to teach
grammatical forms. However, in an investigation of an alternative, explicit intervention approach, in which the examiner
presented the rules guiding the target form, Finestack and Fey (2009) found a significant advantage for explicit instruction in
comparison to implicit instruction. The current study is an extension of the Finestack and Fey (2009) and evaluates the use of an
explicit approach to teach two novel grammatical markers to children with ASD or PLI.
Methods: A total of 17 children with ASD and 25 children with PLI who demonstrated difficulty with grammar completed this
study. Children were aged between 4 and 9 years. Examiners instructed the children that a space creature just came to Earth and
that there is something different about the way the creature talks. The examiners told the children that they had to figure out
the language. Using this game, the children were taught two novel grammatical forms with either explicit or implicit instruction.
With explicit instruction, the game included models of the target form plus specific instructions regarding use of the target
pattern (e.g., "When it is a boy doing the action you have to add -ip to the end"). With implicit instruction, the game only
included models of the novel pattern. The novel target forms form included a gender marker (e.g., "John can eat pizza-ip") and a
first person singular marker (e.g., "I can clap-sh"). Children who achieved 80% accuracy producing the target form were
categorized as pattern users (PU) and those who performed below 80% were categorized as non-pattern users (NON).
Results: For each novel grammatical form and for each instructional approach the number of pattern users (PU) and non-pattern
users (NON) in the ASD and PLI groups were compared using Chi-square analyses. For both the gender and person forms, there
was not a significant difference between the number of ASD and PLI PUs and NONs with explicit (χ2=2.81, p=.09; χ2=2.29, p=.13)
or implicit (χ2=.73, p=.39; χ2=0.11, p=.74) instruction. Within groups, significantly more participants with ASD were PUs when
gender was the target with explicit instruction than implicit instruction (χ2 = 4.10, p = .04), but not for the person form. For the
PLI group, more participants were PUs with explicit instruction for both forms (χ2=11.78, p<.001, χ2=5.49, p=.02). When the ASD
and PLI groups were collapsed, significant differences emerged for both the gender and person forms, favoring explicit
instruction (χ2=5.87, p=.01; χ2=15.07, p<.001).
Discussion: Preliminary results suggest there is no difference in learning with explicit or implicit instruction for children with ASD
or PLI. Both the ASD and PLI groups demonstrated learning advantages with explicit instruction. Subsequent analysis will
investigate the role of expressive and receptive language skills in learning outcomes. However, it appears that explicit instruction
may be a viable treatment approach for both groups of children.
References/Citations:
• Finestack, L. H., & Fey, M. E. (2009). Evaluation of a deductive procedure to teach grammatical inflections to children
with language impairment. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 18(3), 289-302. doi:10.1044/10580360(2009/08-0041)