Effective Intervention With The Language Impaired Child

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are known to exhibit deficits in the areas of phonology, lexical and relational semantics, syntax, morphology, and pragmatics (Fey et al., 2003, p. 3). Interventions designed to improve deficits seen in children with specific language impairment are haracterized general ly as either rule- based or meaning-based. Although neither approach is used exclusively, much of the speech-pathology community gravitates toward meaning-based interventions. H owever, rule-based approaches are still widely used. Many speech language pathologists feel that meaning-based interventions are more effective than rule-based interventions because of their generalized nature. In addition they may feel that rule-based therapy may not work to allow underlying language rules to emerge over time. Because of this, some interventions may be viewed as naturally flawed in understanding of approach and results. With regard to syntactic, morphologic, and phonologic defici