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Language serves as an essential resource to learn about cause and effect throughout childhood. Causal adverbial sentences use causal conjunctions (e.g., because, so) to join two clauses to express cause-effect relationships (Diessel & Hetterle, 2011). Causal adverbial sentences are frequently used to explain causal relationships in academic contexts, such as elementary school science and social studies classes (Kinzie et al., 2014; Williams et al., 2014). Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are at risk for failure in these academically relevant language skills. Here, a multiple probe design was used to examine the effect of language intervention focused on causal adverbials on both causal adverbials and acquisition of academic content for preschool/kindergarten children with SLI. Child performance on sentence elicitation probes of causal adverbials and an untreated control structure will be reported. Greater improvement on the treated structure (causal adverbials) than untreated structures will indicate the intervention affected child skill. Performance on daily probes of science content learning will be presented. The relationship of language skill to acquisition of science content, and implications for clinical practice will be discussed. |
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