Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Clinical Evaluation of the Competing Sources of Input Hypothesis

2017; American Speech–Language–Hearing Association; Volume: 60; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1044/2016_jslhr-l-15-0448

1558-9102

Marc E. Fey, Laurence B. Leonard, Shelley L. Bredin-Oja, Patricia Deevy,

Stuttering Research and Treatment

Purpose Our purpose was to test the competing sources of input (CSI) hypothesis by evaluating an intervention based on its principles. This hypothesis proposes that children's use of main verbs without tense is the result of their treating certain sentence types in the input (e.g., Was she laughing ? ) as models for declaratives (e.g., She laughing ). Method Twenty preschoolers with specific language impairment were randomly assigned to receive either a CSI-based intervention or a more traditional intervention that lacked the novel CSI features. The auxiliary is and the third-person singular suffix – s were directly treated over a 16-week period. Past tense – ed was monitored as a control. Results The CSI-based group exhibited greater improvements in use of is than did the traditional group ( d = 1.31), providing strong support for the CSI hypothesis. There were no significant between-groups differences in the production of the third-person singular suffix – s or the control ( –ed ), however. Conclusions The group differences in the effects on the 2 treated morphemes may be due to differences in their distribution in interrogatives and declaratives (e.g., Is he hiding / He is hiding vs. Does he hide/He hide s ). Refinements in the intervention could address this issue and lead to more general effects across morphemes.