Expressive language skills increase rapidly during the preschool years. For children with impaired language skills, expressing their ideas can be problematic, leading to frustration, classroom difficulties, and difficulty developing peer friendships. Providing language intervention using an innovative protocol, such as the Expanding Expression Tool (EET), enhances the development of vocabulary by teaching a framework of semantic language fundamentals. The purpose of this investigation was to determine the effects of teaching the structured protocol of the EET to preschool children with language delays. The protocol was taught during a verbal description task to elicit lexical categories (i.e., nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) across six treatment sessions. Four participants (ages 4;6-4;11 years) were enrolled from a therapeutic preschool setting and currently were receiving speech and language therapy. The results indicated that using the EET increased the production of lexical categories and the development of semantic skills for recalling salient characteristics of vocabulary targets. Implications for further research would be to employ speech-language pathologists to utilize this framework for teaching vocabulary and expansion of expressive language for writing and speaking to determine if the EET can be effective with diverse populations.
