Efficacy of Expansions and Cloze Procedures in the Development of Interpretations by Preschool Children Exhibiting Delayed Language Development.

Recent intervention studies have demonstrated that adult-provided expansions of child utterances during storybook reading can result in preschool children's development of two-word utterances that describe characters and their actions as well as grammatical morphemes that are targeted for development via expansions. The present study used an alternating-treatments experimental design to compare the effects of two styles of storybook reading on the production of interpretations by two preschool children experiencing delayed language development. One reading style used a combination of expansions and cloze procedures; the other provided questions followed by modeling of appropriate answers. The children produced more answers to questions regarding the storybook, more interpretations, and syntactically more complex utterances in the condition using expansions and cloze procedures. Results are discussed with respect to the use of these techniques in naturalistic intervention and the relationship between their use and the discourse context of the intervention sessions.