TEACHING WORD-FINDING STRATEGIES TO SEVERELY LANGUAGE-IMPAIRED CHILDREN

The present study describes how four severely language-impaired pupils participated in an intervention programme aimed towards improving the ir word-finding skills. Short intervention sessions that concentrated upon a combination of both elaboration and retrieval techniques were c onducted over a period of 4 weeks. Four control subjects received lang uage therapy that was unrelated to word-finding activities. The subjec ts were matched for age, sex and word-finding difficulties' Results re vealed that the two groups differed significantly on the accuracy of w ord retrieval. The four subjects that had received specific interventi on improved in their ability to retrieve words. Two-tailed t-tests ind icated that the improvement was highly significant at the pro ability level of p < 0.01 between the stages of testing. The contribution of t he intervention sessions towards facilitating word-finding strategies of the four children is discussed.