Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions for Developmental Language Disorder.

PURPOSE

Naturalistic-developmental-behavioral interventions (NDBIs) are a widely accepted and validated approach for treating language-related symptoms in autism spectrum disorder, including deficits in vocabulary, social skills, and grammar. The purpose of this article is to define the elements , , and as applied to children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and to provide an example of how this type of intervention can be implemented to teach vocabulary and test cross-modal generalization between expressive and receptive modalities.

METHOD

A vocabulary intervention using hybrid NDBI methods (storybook reading and conversational recast interaction) was provided to three participants with DLD using a single-case design.

RESULTS

The results indicated that all participants successfully learned receptive and expressive vocabulary targets with extensive cross-modal generalization. However, generalization was limited in some of the participants.

CONCLUSIONS

This article provided definitions of key elements of NDBI (, , and ) including a rationale for extending NDBI procedures to language intervention for children with DLD. In addition, a single-case design demonstrated that NDBI can be implemented in DLD and that broadly defined naturalistic-developmental applied behavior analysis techniques are applicable to language interventions for children with language disorders. Moreover, diverse and procedures meet the highest standards for evidence-based practice to treat DLD.