The effect of retrieval practice on vocabulary learning for DHH children

Reimer, C.K., Grantham, H., & Butler, A.C. (2024). The effect of retrieval practice on vocabulary learning for DHH children. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 29, 377-387. https;//doi.org/10.1093/deafed/enae005

Most children begin building their word knowledge or vocabulary in infancy, and this process continues into adulthood. Hearing children often learn vocabulary simply by overhearing it in use by those around them. This process is called incidental learning. Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children typically have smaller vocabularies than their hearing peers. Even if they have access to hearing technology, they are more likely to miss opportunities for incidental learning. DHH children learn words more slowly than their hearing peers. It can be challenging to find effective strategies to support word learning amongst DHH children who themselves differ in their word learning.

Reimer et al. (2024) present retrieval practice as a potential strategy for supporting vocabulary development in DHH children. Retrieval practice is the process of retrieving or recalling newly acquired information – in this case, vocabulary – from one’s memory, and has been shown to lead to better retention long term. While retrieval practice has been studied across various populations and various domains, including for vocabulary learning, its use for vocabulary learning with DHH children has not been explored. The authors set out to examine whether DHH children would retain more new words in one of two conditions:

1) if learned with retrieval practice (e.g., hearing the new words and being asked to recall them), or

2) if learned through exposure (e.g., hearing new words and repeating them immediately).

Following phases of acquisition (e.g., learning to correctly match new vocabulary to picture scenes) and practice (e.g., either retrieval practice or exposure), an assessment phase took place in which the child was asked to recall the new vocabulary words two days later.

Reimer et al. (2024) found that most DHH children recalled more words learned through retrieval practice than through exposure, and that they were twice as likely to be able to recall the new vocabulary word two days later if they had learned it through retrieval practice, compared to exposure. The authors also explored whether specific factors impacted a child’s ability to recall new vocabulary words. They found that DHH children who required additional practice rounds to accurately recall a vocabulary word were less likely to recall the word two days later, and that DHH children with additional diagnoses were less likely to recall new vocabulary words.

Implications of this study include the potential for retrieval practice to serve as one possible specific, direct strategy for supporting vocabulary learning in DHH children. Retrieval practice, however, may not be sufficient for all DHH children, who may need additional strategies and support beyond this.

Blogger: Rachel Benninger is a combined MClSc/PhD candidate working under the supervision of Dr. Lisa Archibald

Are narrative macrostructure skills shared in bilingual children’s two languages, and what predicts them?

Lipner, M., Armon-Lotem, S., Fichman, S., Walters, J., & Altman, C. (2026). Are narrative macrostructure skills shared in bilingual children’s two languages, and what predicts them? Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 57, 277–291. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_LSHSS-25-00049

When we think about how to support bilingual children’s language development, we often assume that the best approach is to just increase their exposure to the school or societal language. However, a recent study offers a more encouraging and practical message for families and educators: reading at home may be one of the most powerful tools we have. In this study, researchers worked with 40 English–Hebrew bilingual preschoolers aged 5–6. The children were individually told short, picture-based stories in each language and were then asked to retell them. Their stories were carefully analyzed based on key story elements, such as introducing characters, describing a problem, expressing emotions, and including goals and outcomes. Parents also completed questionnaires about their child’s language background, including when the child was first exposed to Hebrew and how often they read books with their child in each language.

Overall, children told more detailed and well-organized stories in their home language, English, than in Hebrew. They were more likely to clearly introduce characters, describe emotions, and include important parts of a story. What stood out most, however, was that the strongest predictor of how well children told stories in Hebrew was not how early they were exposed to Hebrew, or even how strong their Hebrew vocabulary was. Instead, it was how often their parents read to them and even more surprising was that the parents read mostly in English. This suggests that shared book reading in the home language can help children develop an understanding of how stories work, and this knowledge can transfer across languages. In other words, learning story structure in one language supports storytelling in another. These findings send an important message to parents about the importance of simply reading together regularly—especially in the language parents feel most comfortable using. These experiences can play a meaningful role in strengthening bilingual children’s language and literacy skills in both languages.

Blogger: Diya Nair is a second year PhD student under the supervision of Dr Lisa Archibald.

Changes in production of complex syntax by elementary-aged school children

Pavelko, S.L., Owens, R.E., & Hahs-Vaughn, D.L. (2025). Changes in production of complex syntax by elementary-aged school children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 56, 1002-1010. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_LSHSS-24-00141

As language skills develop, a child’s length of spoken utterance increases in length. There is an assumption that as utterance length increases, the sentences spoken also become more complex. Complex sentences include (1) compound (2 simple sentences joined by a conjunction like ‘and’), (2) complex (a sentence and a clause, which is not a full sentence), or (3) compound-complex (2 simple sentences joined with a conjunction and at least 1 clause). It’s reasonable to expect that the proportion of complex sentences spoken would change as children age, but past research has not found such a difference.

The present study examined children’s language samples for how age (5-10 years) predicted (1) the proportion of complex sentences with different types of clauses and (2) the proportion of compound sentences with different types of conjunctions. Findings revealed no age-related differences in the proportion of complex sentences across all clause types. An age-related difference in the proportion of compound sentences was found for the conjunctions but and so, but not and.

The modest age-related differences in complex and compound sentences reported in this study were surprising. The findings provide limited guidance for intervention. Further research is needed examining complex and compound sentence use by children with language difficulties such as Developmental Language Disorder (DLD).

Blogger: Lisa Archibald

Fit for purpose. Co-production of complex behavioural interventions: A practical guide and exemplar of co-producing a telehealth-delivered exercise intervention for people with stroke

Ramage, E.R., Burke, M., Galloway, M., Graham, I.D., Janssen, H., Marsden, D.L., Patterson, A.J., Pollack, M., Said, C.M., Lynch, E.A., English, C. (2022). Fit for purpose. Co-production of complex behavioural interventions. A practical guide and exemplar of co-producing a telehealth-delivered exercise intervention for people with stroke. Health Research Policy and Systems, 20(2). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-021-00790-2

Ramage and colleagues set out to develop an intervention protocol for people living with stroke that was to be delivered via telehealth. To increase the real-world application of the intervention, the authors used an approach in which the intervention protocol was co-produced by people living with stroke, caregivers of people living with stroke, and clinicians who would implement the intervention (these individuals referred to collectively as knowledge users).

Ramage, et al. used a 4-stage process including stages of:

• Start-up and planning – the research team met to determine the scope of the project and the essential components to be included in the intervention, such as timeline and the groups of knowledge users to be involved,
• Content development – recruitment of the knowledge users, facilitating workshops to discuss the intervention, outcomes, barriers, and enablers,
• Protocol development – refining the intervention protocol based on input from the knowledge users and identifying areas requiring further input, and
• Adaptation – demonstrating aspects of the intervention protocol, providing examples of materials and equipment for the intervention, and identifying further revisions to intervention.

Challenges with this process included competing time pressures, frequency and duration of meetings, power imbalance, and clear communication. Practical tips for supporting this process included involving more than one individual in each knowledge user group so that the weight of the role is shared by multiple individuals and allows for multiple opinions/experiences, ensuring clear and consistent expectations, providing materials and information about the workshops to knowledge users ahead of time so they can prepare, and being flexible with meeting frequency and duration.

The authors provide reflections on the sharing of power in co-production projects and the process of collaborative decision making, expressing the importance of all team members having a chance to voice their opinions and experiences. At the point of publication, the telehealth-delivered intervention protocol for individuals living with stroke was in a phase of testing prior to implementation.

Blogger: Rachel Benninger is a combined MClSc/PhD candidate working under the supervision of Dr. Lisa Archibald

Story generation and narrative retells in children who are hard of hearing and hearing children

Walker, E. A., Harrison, M., Baumann, R., Moeller, M. P., Sorensen, E., Oleson, J. J., & McCreery, R. W. (2023). Story generation and narrative retells in children who are hard of hearing and hearing children. Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 66(9), 3550–3573. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_jslhr-23-00084

Narrative ability refers to the ability to generate and retell stories and is a vital part of language and literacy development. Narrative ability is measured in 2 ways: Story generation is when a story is narrated with or without prompts such as pictures and story retelling is when a story is first narrated and then is to be retold in the similar manner.

Walker et al. (2023) investigated how children who are hard of hearing (HH) perform on story generation and retelling tasks compared to hearing children and examined which underlying factors best explain these differences. The researchers studied a large cohort of school-age children. The researchers examined whether factors such as grammar, vocabulary, and phonological memory mediated the relationship between hearing status and story generation or story retelling. This approach allowed them to determine whether the impact of hearing loss on storytelling was direct, or whether it operated indirectly through language development and auditory experience. Children who are hard of hearing scored lower overall than hearing children on both story generation and retell measures. Their narratives were often shorter, less syntactically complex, and contained fewer complete story elements. However, when language ability was considered as a mediator, the effect of hearing status on narrative skills was substantially reduced or even non-significant. This finding indicates that language ability is the key pathway linking hearing status to narrative performance. In other words, children who are hard of hearing do not struggle with storytelling because of hearing loss per se, but rather because hearing loss can influence the development of language skills that are foundational for narrative expression. Children with stronger expressive and receptive language abilities—whether hard of hearing or hearing—produced more coherent and detailed stories.

Walker et al. (2023)’s findings highlight that language proficiency mediates the relationship between hearing loss and narrative skill, suggesting that appropriate language support and early intervention will help children who are hard of hearing achieve better narrative skills. This research reinforces the need for comprehensive language-focused educational approaches to promote literacy and communication success in all children.

Blogger: Diya Nair is a second year PhD student under the supervision of Dr Lisa Archibald.

Narrative identity formation: Rethinking speech-language pathologists’ (SLPs) impact through a critical lens

Mayo, L (2025). Narrative identity formation: Rethinking speech-language pathologists’ (SLPs) impact through a critical lens. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 34, 3025-3033. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_AJSLP-24-00460

Narrative language refers to the ability to tell stories. Narratives are a common communicative activity and also are an excellent language task often used by SLPs to assess language skills. Narrative structure has been described as 'story grammar', that is the sequence of essential narrative components in a story including elements such as character, setting, initiating event, problem, resolution. Many assessment tools and interventions are based on story grammar structure.

Mayo offers a critical lens to this practice. She argues that there is a presumption that story grammar elements are universal but that they actually represent Westernized narrative structure. Using tools based on Westernized narrative structure to assess a child whose cultural and linguistic context is non-Westernized could result in misinterpretation and misidentification. Mayo calls for SLPs to co-construct narratives with children and to consider the child’s cultural and linguistic context. 

Mayo does acknowledge the challenges here. Further research is needed to understand different narrative styles. But SLPs can take a ‘code switching’ rather than a ‘code overwriting’ approach where they support the child’s narrative identity but also prepare them for academic success in a system that prioritizes Western narrative style.

Blogger: Lisa Archibald

Perception versus comprehension of bound morphemes in children who are deaf and hard of hearing: The pivotal role of form-meaning mapping

Barcroft, J., Mauzé, E., Sommers, M., Spehar, & Tye-Murray, N. (2025). Perception versus comprehension of bound morphemes in children who are deaf and hard of hearing: The pivotal role of form-meaning mapping. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 68, 1024-1037. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00271

Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) often fall behind their hearing peers with language development, have reduced vocabularies, and weaker syntax skills. In particular, morphemes (the smallest parts of words that carry meaning) at the end of words are especially difficult for DHH children. One factor contributing to this difficulty is that word-final morphemes are often quieter when produced, and often consist of high frequency sounds, which are commonly more difficult to perceive by DHH children. Many of these morphemes are learned in part through hearing them in use, which may also make learning them more difficult for DHH children.

Barcroft et al. discuss two factors that impact the acquisition of these morphemes: input (i.e., the words the individual is exposed to) and intake (i.e., the information processed by the individual). Many DHH children might face compound difficulties with these morphemes due to having reduced input (e.g., lower exposure to the morphemes) and reduced intake (e.g., due to reduced ability to perceive the morphemes). Another consideration is that there may be a discrepancy between perception and comprehension of these morphemes. That is, some individuals might perceive (hear) the morpheme, but may not actually comprehend (understand) its meaning.

In their paper, Barcroft and colleagues asked:

1. How well can DHH children perceive morphemes?
2. How well can DHH children comprehend morphemes?
3. Do DHH children acquire these morphemes in a particular order?
4. Is perception and/or comprehension in DHH children impacted by vocabulary size or modality (i.e., auditory only vs. audiovisual presentation of information)?

DHH children between the ages of 5 and 12 years participated in a series of tasks including a bound morpheme assessment testing the perception and comprehension of 4 types of morphemes (i.e., contractions, plurals, possessives, past tense), and standardized vocabulary measures.

Barcroft et al. found that DHH children overall had better performance on measures of perception than of comprehension, and that higher performance with one type of morpheme did not mean high performance on all morphemes. The authors found that DHH children with higher vocabulary scores (i.e., those with larger vocabularies) did better with morpheme tasks, and that there did not seem to be a difference between auditory only vs. audiovisual information.

This research demonstrates the importance of vocabulary knowledge for the development of other linguistic skills (i.e., use and comprehension of morphemes), and shows the importance of connecting morphemes to meaning to support comprehension. Barcroft et al. emphasize the need to address both the perception and comprehension of morphemes in DHH children, reminding us that access does not = understanding.

Blogger: Rachel Benninger is a combined MClSc/PhD candidate working under the supervision of Dr. Lisa Archibald

Collaborative working with parents of children with DLD in speech and language therapy: Identifying Dutch speech and language therapists’ barriers to enhancing practice

Klatte et al. (2025). Collaborative working with parents of children with DLD in speech and language therapy: Identifying Dutch speech and language therapists’ barriers to enhancing practice. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 156, 104882. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2024.104882

It is generally accepted that it is important to involve families in decision-making in the context of health and wellbeing interventions for young children. Such family-centred care requires collaboration between families and the professionals providing the services. This collaboration involves joint input on goals, planning, implementation and evaluation. In some contexts, a move to family-centred care requires practice change. Past studies by this author group have focused on identifying collaboration in behavioural terms, choosing select behaviours to target for change, and how to implement the behaviour for change. The current study focused on what needed to change in order to adopt the target behaviours.

In this study, focus groups were conducted with speech-language therapists (SLTs) in the Netherlands. Either in preparation for or during the focus groups, participants completed three assignments focused on (1) describing a challenging collaboration, (2) identifying parent priorities, or (3) establishing goals. Participants placed figures to position the parent, child and themselves for collaboration. They also wrote down their thoughts, feelings and actions. Participants then discussed their responses as a group. Results revealed two types of beliefs: beliefs about how SLTs can be supported in collaborating with parents (i.e., need for confidence, knowledge, skills) and (2) beliefs that are in conflict with collaborative working with parents (i.e., related to professional identity, consequences, emotion, environmental context and resources, social influences). More specifically, SLTs reported feeling pressure from parents, society and health insurances to spend their time on working directly with children, which hinders collaborating with parents.

It can be challenging for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and SLTs to work collaboratively with parents in the context of high service demands. One important goal in this area would be to increase SLP/SLTs confidence in collaboration skills. 

Blogger: Lisa Archibald

Quantity and Complexity of Speech-Language Pathologists’ Talk During School-Based Therapy

Sun, J., Justice, L. M., Jhuo, R.-A., & Jiang, H. (2025). Quantity and Complexity of Speech-Language Pathologists’ Talk During School-Based Therapy. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_AJSLP-24-00303

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulties learning language for no obvious reasons. Speech and language therapy is critical in helping children with DLD develop their language skills. One way speech-language pathologists (SLPs) can promote language growth is by using child-directed speech (e.g., how SLPs talk to children) to create a language rich-environment. We know from previous work that how parents and teachers talk to children influences children’s language growth, but this has not yet been studied in SLPs. Based on a previous study from this same research group (Sun et al., 2023), SLP talk was measured in the following ways: 1) Quantity – the volume of talk was characterized by number of utterances and number of words; 2) Grammatical complexity – based on auxiliary verbs/copulas, conjunctions; and 3) Lexical complexity – based on verbs, adjectives, and different words used. 

There are also SLP-specific and session-specific factors that may contribute to language growth. The current study focuses on 5 SLP characteristics: years of experience, caseload size, job satisfaction, self-efficacy, and time pressure; and 9 session characteristics: number of children in session, session duration, child’s age, grade, gender, family income, and measures on language, phonological awareness, and intelligence. The aim was to determine these factors predicted SLPs’ talk (e.g., quantity, grammatical complexity, lexical complexity).

The study involved observing 75 SLPs and 281 children (kindergarten to grade 2) across 209 business-as-usual therapy sessions. The findings showed wide variability in SLP talk. For example, number of words used (indexing quantity) ranged from 167-4000 per session. Further, some characteristics studied were related to SLPs’ quantity and complexity of talk, but not others. In terms of SLP characteristics: 1) SLPs with more years of experience produced less quantity of talk; 2) higher time pressure was positively linked to all dimensions (e.g., more quantity, greater lexical and grammatical complexity). In terms of session characteristics: 1) longer sessions led to more talk and more complex talk; 2) the older the child, the more complex the SLP’s talk; 3) lower phonological awareness score was linked to greater quantity and complexity too.  

Overall, the findings serve as a starting point for understanding how SLP talk can serve as a source of rich language input during therapy sessions, and what factors potentially influence the quantity and quality of talk. More research is needed to understand how we can leverage on SLPs’ and other professionals’ (e.g., educators) talk as a means to improve language outcomes for children with DLD.

 Blogger: Theresa Pham is a Postdoctoral Associate.

Sharing stories versus explaining facts: Comparing African American children’s microstructure performance across fictional narrative, informational, and procedural discourse

Gardner-Neblett, N., & Alvarez, D. L. (2024). Sharing stories versus explaining facts: Comparing African American children’s microstructure performance across fictional narrative, informational, and procedural discourse. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 67(11), 4431–4445. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-23-00579

Discourse refers to the ability to put spoken (or written) utterances / statements together in communicative tasks. Fictional stories (or narratives) are one type of discourse. Young children often hear and are encouraged to tell stories. Other types of discourse involve explanations or descriptions. For example, information discourse refers to telling factual information about something (e.g., dinosaurs) and procedural discourse is when the steps of a task are described. A key feature of effective discourse is microstructure, or the sentence level grammatical features. Microstructure can be measured in terms of how many words or different words are produced (i.e., productivity) or the grammatical structure of sentences (i.e., complex sentence structures).

In this study, 130 African American kindergarten through second-grade students were shown wordless picture books to elicit three types of spoken discourse: narrative, procedural, informational. The findings showed that children produced longer and more diverse language in fictional narratives compared to informational and procedural discourse. Fictional narratives and procedural discourse also demonstrated more complex sentence structures than informational discourse. Additionally, older children generally outperformed younger ones in productivity and complexity, particularly in fictional and informational discourse.

The findings suggests that educators and speech-language pathologists should consider different discourse types when assessing and supporting children’s language development. Expository discourse is often used in teaching, so children may benefit from targeted strategies to develop their expository language skills.

Blogger: Diya Nair is a first year PhD student under the supervision of Dr Lisa Archibald