**POSTPONED**Vanderbilt Kennedy Center Lecture on Development and Developmental Disabilities: Improving Early Language Intervention for Preschoolers with Emergent Developmental Language Disorder
Due to unforeseen circumstances, this lecture has been postponed with plans to reschedule at a later date.
Pamela Hadley, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Director, Applied Psycholinguistics Lab, Professor of Speech and Hearing Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Preschoolers at-risk for developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulty combining words into diverse, simple sentences. In contrast, toddlers developing language typically demonstrate growth in sentence diversity between 21 and 30 months of age, and their ability to produce diverse, simple sentences predicts growth in broader aspects of grammatical development. However, most early intervention approaches do not emphasize the ability to produce diverse, simple sentences as a fundamental component of language intervention. In this talk, I will address the link between sentence diversity and later developing grammatical structures and the importance of understanding sentence development when evaluating young children’s risk for DLD. This will be followed by the theoretical rationale and empirical evidence for toy talk, a descriptive commenting strategy, that has been shown to facilitate sentence diversity in typically developing toddlers and the use of the Sentence Diversity Priming Task to characterize differences between children and progress over time in sentence-focused interventions. The talk will conclude with a description of the sentence-focused sequence of treatment targets that have been incorporated into the Enhanced Milieu Teaching-Sentence Focus (EMT-SF) clinical trial (Kaiser, Roberts, & Hadley, NCT03782493) and the evidence for short-term treatment effects on grammar for preschoolers with emergent DLD.
NICHD R21HD071316; NIDCD R01 DC016273, U01 DC017135; NSF/IES 2229873
About the Speaker:Professor Hadley teaches language development and language disorders in early childhood. Her research examines the nature of specific language impairment (SLI) in early childhood, a high incidence condition characterized by extraordinary difficulty with language acquisition in the presence of otherwise typical development.
For more information, call (615) 322-8240.