Language changes associated with Fast ForWord-Language: Evidence from casestudies

Based principally on reports of two experimental investigations, the Scient ific Learning Corporation claims that Fast ForWord-Language (FFW-L) yields 1-1/2 to 3 years language gain over a 6-week period. We evaluated various a spects of this claim by measuring the language changes of four children who received FFW-L language intervention in their homes. Language change was a ssessed immediately following intervention and 3 months later, using standa rdized language measures, spontaneous measures of syntactic complexity, rea ding measures, pragmatic measures, and parent and teacher reports. Three of the four children successfully completed FFW-L, and all made gains on some of the same standardized measures used by P. Tallal et al. (1996), althoug h the improvements we observed were generally smaller than those previously reported. All children also made gains on measures of pragmatic performanc e. However, very few changes were observed in the children's Developmental Sentence Scores (DSSs), indicating that gains in productive use of grammar changed only marginally. One child showed evidence of gains in standard ass essment of his phonological awareness skills. According to questionnaire da ta, parents and teachers did not report many differences in performance aft er intervention; however, parental satisfaction with the program was genera lly high. Sixty-one percent of the gains observed at posttesting were maint ained 3 months following intervention; however, a number also were not main tained. Of the total 595 items assessed at pretest and posttest, significan t positive change occurred on 58 or 10% of the items. Our findings suggest that, although FFW-L delivered at home by parents may lead to some importan t changes in children's performance on structured tasks, broad, dramatic ga ins in spontaneous language use are less likely and may not be long-lasting . Future experimental investigations should include measures of pragmatic p erformance to substantiate the preliminary findings of these case studies.