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Many early studies failed to find differences in the language input of parents to children with specific language impairments (SLI) when compared to the input provided for MLU-matched children with typical language (TL). More recent investigations have revealed significant differences in the frequency of sentence recasts provided to young children. Specifically, parents of children with SLI have been shown to produce fewer recasts than do parents of younger children with TL. Because recasts have been shown to facilitate morphosyntactic development, these findings have important assessment and treatment implications.
The purpose of this study was to replicate and extend these recent findings. The sentence recast usage of the parents of 10 children with SLI was compared with the recast usage of parents of 10 younger children with TL at two points in time. This strategy enabled us to
examine specific hypotheses about the quantity of recasts used by parents and the changes in patterns of use over time. The results failed to confirm recent findings; there were no differences between groups at either time. We interpret this to suggest that parents of children with SLI may not differ substantially from parents of children with TL in recast usage, at least in the early preschool years when the age gap separating children with SLI and languagematched children with TL is not great. Nevertheless, to benefit from their facilitative properties, children with SLI seem to need recasts that are more frequent or more focused on specific targets than are typically available in their environments.
Key Words: sentence recasts, language intervention, grammar development, specific language impairment, parent input
Sentence recasts are adult replies to child utterances that copy some of the child's words and provide new syntactic and/or semantic information, while maintaining the basic details of the child's original meaning. Several experimental investigations have shown that recasts stimulate length and complexity of utterances in children with typical language (TL) (Baker & Nelson,1984; Hovell, Schumaker, & Sherman, 1978; Nelson,1977; Nelson, Carskaddan, & Bonvillian,1973; Scherer & Olswang, 1984), those with specific language impairment (SLI) (Camarata & Nelson, 1992; Camarata, Nelson, & Camarata, 1994; Fey, Cleave, & Long,1997; Fey, Cleave, Long, & Hughes,1993; Nelson, Camarata, Welsh, Butkovsky, & Camarata, 1996), and those with developmental delays and disorders (Scherer & Olswang,...