TY - JOUR
T1 - Efficacy of the treatment of developmental language disorder
T2 - A systematic review
AU - Rinaldi, Sara
AU - Caselli, Maria Cristina
AU - Cofelice, Valentina
AU - D’Amico, Simonetta
AU - De Cagno, Anna Giulia
AU - Corte, Giuseppina Della
AU - Di Martino, Maria Valeria
AU - Di Costanzo, Brigida
AU - Levorato, Maria Chiara
AU - Penge, Roberta
AU - Rossetto, Tiziana
AU - Sansavini, Alessandra
AU - Vecchi, Simona
AU - Zoccolotti, Pierluigi
N1 - Funding Information:
The present review was carried out as part of a Consensus Conference (CC), held in Italy, on the diagnosis and treatment of children with DLD (information on the CC is available at www.disturboprimariolinguaggio.it 30 December 2020). The Conference was organized and partially financed by CLASTA?Communication and Language Acquisition Studies in Typical & Atypical Populations, represented by Maria Chiara Levorato, Simonetta D?Amico and Alessandra Sansavini; and FLI?Federazione Logopedisti Italiani (Italian Federation of Speech Therapists), represented by Anna Giulia De Cagno and Tiziana Rossetto. FLI participated also with Manuela Pieretti.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
PY - 2021/3
Y1 - 2021/3
N2 - Background. Language disorder is the most frequent developmental disorder in childhood and it has a significant negative impact on children’s development. The goal of the present review was to systematically analyze the effectiveness of interventions in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) from an evidence-based perspective. Methods. We considered systematic reviews, meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), control group cohort studies on any type of intervention aimed at improving children’s skills in the phono-articulatory, phonological, semantic-lexical, and morpho-syntactic fields in preschool and primary school children (up to eight years of age) that were diagnosed with DLD.We identified 27 full-length studies, 26 RCT and one review. Results. Early intensive intervention in three- and four-year-old children has a positive effect on phonological expressive and receptive skills and acquisitions are maintained in the medium term. Less evidence is available on the treatment of expressive vocabulary (and no evidence on receptive vocabulary). Intervention on morphological and syntactic skills has effective results on expressive (but not receptive) skills; however, a number of inconsistent results have also been reported. Only one study reports a positive effect of treatment on inferential narrative skills. Limited evidence is also available on the treatment of meta-phonological skills. More studies investigated the effectiveness of interventions on general language skills, which now appears as a promising area of investigation, even though results are not all consistent. Conclusions. The effectiveness of interventions over expressive and receptive phonological skills, morpho-syntactic skills, as well as inferential skills in narrative context underscores the importance that these trainings be implemented in children with DLD.
AB - Background. Language disorder is the most frequent developmental disorder in childhood and it has a significant negative impact on children’s development. The goal of the present review was to systematically analyze the effectiveness of interventions in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) from an evidence-based perspective. Methods. We considered systematic reviews, meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), control group cohort studies on any type of intervention aimed at improving children’s skills in the phono-articulatory, phonological, semantic-lexical, and morpho-syntactic fields in preschool and primary school children (up to eight years of age) that were diagnosed with DLD.We identified 27 full-length studies, 26 RCT and one review. Results. Early intensive intervention in three- and four-year-old children has a positive effect on phonological expressive and receptive skills and acquisitions are maintained in the medium term. Less evidence is available on the treatment of expressive vocabulary (and no evidence on receptive vocabulary). Intervention on morphological and syntactic skills has effective results on expressive (but not receptive) skills; however, a number of inconsistent results have also been reported. Only one study reports a positive effect of treatment on inferential narrative skills. Limited evidence is also available on the treatment of meta-phonological skills. More studies investigated the effectiveness of interventions on general language skills, which now appears as a promising area of investigation, even though results are not all consistent. Conclusions. The effectiveness of interventions over expressive and receptive phonological skills, morpho-syntactic skills, as well as inferential skills in narrative context underscores the importance that these trainings be implemented in children with DLD.
KW - Developmental language disorder
KW - Evidence-based
KW - Intervention
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U2 - 10.3390/brainsci11030407
DO - 10.3390/brainsci11030407
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85103648106
VL - 11
JO - Brain Sciences
JF - Brain Sciences
SN - 2076-3425
IS - 3
M1 - 407
ER -