The article, “Three Treatments for Bilingual Children with Primary Language Impairment: Examining Crosslingual and Cross-Domain Effects,” presents a study supported by a grant received from the National Institute on Deafness and other communication disorders (NIDCD). A common developmental disorder such as the one examined in this study, primary or specific language impairment (PLI), is defined by poor language skills not attributable to neurological, sensory, cognitive, or motor disorders or environmental factors (Leonard, 1998; Schwartz, 2009 ). Children with PLI exhibit weakness in oral language that contributes to difficulties in written language, significantly placing bilingual children with PLI at academic and social risk. The most obvious symptoms can change with the severity of the disorder, with the characteristics of the language or languages to be learned and with the child's developmental stage. Bilingual children show significant impairment in both languages, compared to their peers with similar language learning experiences. Due to the significant lack of evidence needed to implement treatment protocols for bilingual children with PLI, researchers compared three different treatment programs administered by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) on language and cognitive outcomes in Spanish/English bilingual children with PLI. The programs used a combination of computer-based and interactive training strategies. Participants were 59 bilingual Spanish/English children with PLI, 50 of whom were boys and 9 of whom were girls aged 5;6 - 11;2. All attended one of eight schools in the Minneapolis Public School District and received special education services. Qualification for these SPEDs the...... middle of the paper ......mi pre- and post-tests in all experimental groups were relatively modest. The results for children in the active treatment groups were not statistically different from those in the control group. The limited literature for PLI school-age children suggests that change has been slow compared to standard scores on norm-referenced tests. It was noted that they had focused their analyzes on general measures of language and cognitive abilities. The study was also influenced by the sample size, particularly of the control group. It would have been productive if they had considered the characteristics of each child at baseline, and examined the effects of age, initial severity, and language context. The author also noted that more homogeneous samples of bilingual children with PLI in future explorations and that the overall intensity of experimental treatment was high for children.
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