This investigation is a case study for a male, 8;2 Spanish-English bilingual child with language impairment. Intervention comprised of semantic training for complex (optionally ditransitive) verbs in Spanish (L1) following the principles of semantic bootstrapping. According to semantic bootstrapping theory, as the participant was taught the verb's meaning, he would also learn its argument requirements, which are semantic-syntactic in nature. Treatment effects, generalization to similarly and to less complex verbs, and generalization to English (L2) were measured. The participant did appear to learn the meaning of the verbs and use their optional and obligatory complex argument structures in conversational speech. There was some evidence of generalization to English, as well. However, the participant did not generalize to other Spanish verbs in probe data, likely due to the loosely constrained probes and due to argument structure being a more closely semantically-tied than syntactically-tied grammatical component. Semantic meaning does not generalize across lexical items, but rather is learned as a discrete unit. This study contributes to the small base of research on using theoretically grounded treatments for children with language impairment. Potential implications for treatment include using a child's L1 and using ditransitive or transitive verbs rather than intransitive verbs for treatment of argument structures whenever possible.
展开▼
