Dawes, E., Leitão, S., Claessen, M., & Kane, R. (2019). A randomized controlled trial of an oral inferential comprehension intervention for young children with developmental language disorder. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 35(1), 39–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265659018815736
Inferential comprehension involves making connections between what you already know and new information to you. These connections allow you to draw conclusions or deepen understanding beyond just what is stated. Although inferencing is a skill that develops throughout childhood, children with a persistent language learning difficulty known as Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) tend to have weaker inferencing skills as compared to their peers. One way to help improve inferencing skills could be to work with stories, which require lots of inferencing.
In this study, 5-6 year old children with DLD either participated in a small group intervention based on retelling stories and making inferences (inferencing group) or participated in an intervention targeting phonemic awareness or the awareness of speech sounds in words (control group). Inferencing scores for the inferencing group improved significantly as compared to the control group. The improvements made by the inferencing group remained higher even after the intervention was completed (i.e., during the maintenance phase). Both groups displayed an increase in literal comprehension across the intervention, which was still seen at follow-up. To measure if children could apply skills developed in the intervention sessions to stories not included in the study, an additional story retell task was measured after the intervention. Results revealed significantly better understanding of inferences for the inferencing group as compared to the control.
These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of intervention for inferencing skills in children with DLD. The differences in skill-building between the inferential and literal comprehension suggests that both of these skills need to be specifically targeted in intervention. Inferencing skills are important for many social and academic contexts and their development should encouraged during early school-aged years.
