The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of dialogic reading on the expressive vocabulary skills of children with moderate to severe expressive language delays. Previous research has shown positive effects of dialogic reading on the language skills of children who are typically developing and on children who are at-risk for language delays. However, there is limited research indicating the effectiveness of dialogic reading on children with moderate to severely delayed language skills. The participants in this multiple baseline across participants designed study received four weeks of individual dialogic reading intervention which was intended to increase their expressive vocabulary skills of a near-transfer vocabulary word list. The results revealed that all three participants demonstrated a significant increase in expressive vocabulary of the near-transfer vocabulary list. Additionally, dialogic reading increased the mean length of utterance (MLU) of the participants, though to varying degrees. More improvement was noted in the MLU of the participant who was in the earlier stage of language development than the participants in the later stage of language development.
Keywords: dialogic reading, intervention, word knowledge, expressive language
