Purpose This single-case study examines a complexity approach to target selection in grammatical intervention in three children with varying levels of mastery of tense and agreement. Specifically, we examine whether targeting a complex tense and agreement grammatical structure (auxiliary BE in questions) leads to generalization to other less complex and related tense and agreement markers (auxiliary BE in declaratives, copula BE, third-person singular – s , and past tense – ed ). Method Three children (all boys; aged 5;5–9;7 [years;months]) with deficits in morphosyntax were enrolled in a treatment program targeting a complex grammatical structure (auxiliary BE in questions) following collection of multiple baselines. Children's performance on the complex structure and related tense and agreement markers were tracked before, during, and after the intervention across three different tasks. Results Results show that, despite its grammatical complexity, the target was elicited in all three children with incomplete mastery of the tense and agreement system. Furthermore, all children demonstrated generalization to expressive language by increasing their mean length of utterance by approximately one morpheme during spontaneous language production following intervention. All children demonstrated individual patterns of generalization to other tense and agreement structures not targeted during intervention. Conclusions These functional changes observed following intervention set the stage for future controlled studies to establish a stronger cause–effect relation. Taken together, this study contributes to an emerging body of work showing that complex grammatical targets may be used in intervention earlier than previously thought.

中文翻译：

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在学龄儿童中使用复杂性方法进行跨语素泛化

目的这项单案例研究探讨了对时态和一致性掌握程度不同的三名儿童进行语法干预时目标选择的复杂性方法。具体来说，我们检查针对复杂的时态和一致语法结构（疑问句中的助动词 BE）是否会导致泛化到其他不太复杂且相关的时态和一致标记（陈述句中的助动词 BE、系词 BE、第三人称单数 –s，以及过去时 –编辑）。 方法收集多个基线后，三名患有形态句法缺陷的儿童（均为男孩；年龄 5;5–9;7 [岁；月]）被纳入针对复杂语法结构（问题中的辅助 BE）的治疗计划。在三项不同任务的干预之前、期间和之后跟踪儿童在复杂结构以及相关时态和一致标记上的表现。 结果结果表明，尽管语法复杂，但所有三个未完全掌握时态和一致系统的孩子都引出了目标。此外，所有儿童在干预后自发语言产生过程中，通过将平均话语长度增加大约一个语素，表现出对表达性语言的概括。所有儿童都表现出对干预期间未针对的其他时态和协议结构进行概括的个人模式。 结论干预后观察到的这些功能变化为未来的对照研究建立更强的因果关系奠定了基础。总而言之，这项研究为一项新兴的工作做出了贡献，表明复杂的语法目标可能比以前想象的更早地用于干预。