Purpose: We asked whether improvements in finite morpheme use would be observed in the narrative retells of children with specific language impairment (SLI) after receiving intervention focused on past tense. Half of the children began with highly frequent, telic, simple to produce verbs (aka easy first); half began with low frequency, atelic words with complex phonology (aka hard first).

Method: Seventeen children with SLI (ages 4-9) received 36 intervention sessions over a 6-month period (usually 45-minute sessions twice a week). Intervention techniques included sentence imitation, observational modeling, syntax stories, and recasting. Narrative retells of three Mercer Mayer Frog stories were used to assess progress at three time points (pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test, which occurred after a 4-8 week delay). 

Results: We hypothesized that all children would show significant improvements in the regular past tense –ed morpheme and some improvement in other finite morphemes from pre- to post-test and that children enrolled in the “hard first” condition would show greater improvements in accuracy on both trained and untrained words. Results will be discussed in the context of changes in morphological accuracy after intervention.