Internal State Terms in the Narratives of Bilingual Children With Developmental Language Disorder: The Role of Microstructure and Macrostructure

PURPOSE

We examined the role of narrative microstructure (production of words and sentences) and narrative macrostructure (organization of events) in the use of internal state terms (ISTs) in narratives of bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD) in their school language (SL).

METHOD

Fifty-eight Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschool children aged 55-78 months divided into two groups participated: 16 bilingual children diagnosed with bilingual DLD and 42 with typical language development (TLD). Narratives were elicited in SL/Hebrew using the wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You? Narratives were transcribed and coded for frequency of ISTs and classified as perceptual, linguistic, motivational, linguistic, emotional, or physical. ISTs were also examined in terms of their role in microstructure (tokens and types) and macrostructure (Character, Setting, Initiating Event, Internal Response, Plan, Attempt, and Consequence) categories.

RESULTS

In terms of microstructure, bilingual children with DLD produced fewer word types and tokens in general and fewer perceptual ISTs than bilingual TLD peers. In terms of macrostructure, children with DLD used six out of the seven story grammar elements in their narratives less than bilinguals with TLD. For ISTs and macrostructure, bilinguals with DLD produced fewer linguistic ISTs in Attempts than their peers with TLD.

CONCLUSIONS

Bilingual children with DLD have difficulties in producing ISTs, and this difficulty is shown to be related to both microstructure and macrostructure abilities. Suggestions for clinical intervention are offered to assist children with DLD in producing narratives that involve mental state language related to characters' feelings, intentions, and goals.

Collateral Effects of the Tell Me MORE! Intervention on the Joint Reminiscing of Mothers of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

PURPOSE

The purpose of this study was to analyze secondary data from three mother-child dyads in order to evaluate how family photographs and training in naturalistic strategies affected the way mothers reminisce with their children with autism spectrum disorders.

METHOD

A secondary analysis (i.e., collateral effects) of a single-case dataset was conducted to assess the impact of family photographs and training in naturalistic strategies on the selected variables.

RESULTS

The introduction of family photographs showed positive effects on the mother's reminiscing style and the child's memory responses across all dyads. Furthermore, additional improvements were observed in these areas after training and coaching in the target strategies.

CONCLUSION

This study demonstrates the positive impact of using family photographs and naturalistic based strategies in joint-reminiscing conversations for mothers and children with autism spectrum disorder. The intervention improved the mothers reminiscing style and child's memory responses, highlighting the potential value of parent-implemented interventions, especially those based on naturalistic strategies, in supporting individuals with autism spectrum disorder and their caregivers.

Examining Adolescent Language Performance in Discourse Production Across Four Elicitation Tasks

PURPOSE

Comprehensive spoken language assessment should include the evaluation of language use in naturalistic contexts. Discourse elicitation and analysis provides the opportunity for such an evaluation to occur. In this article, our overall aim was to describe adolescents' language performance on four elicitation tasks and determine if there are task-related differences across the elicitation tasks.

METHOD

Forty-four typically developing adolescents with ages ranging from 12;2 to 17;11 (years;months; M = 15;2; 21 boys and 23 girls) participated in the study. They completed four spoken discourse tasks: (a) story generation using a wordless picture book, (b) fable retell, (c) six personal narratives in response to emotion-based prompts, and (d) monologic response to two stories that contained a moral dilemma. Responses were transcribed and analyzed for four language performance measures tapping into language productivity, syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and verbal facility.

RESULTS

Despite individual variability in performance, mean scores were close to median scores for most measures, suggesting a symmetrical distribution. As expected, all four language performance measures were significantly different across the four elicitation tasks. The personal narrative task elicited the longest samples, with the highest verbal fluency. In contrast, both lexical diversity and syntactic complexity were the strongest in response to the fable retell and the moral dilemma tasks.

CONCLUSIONS

This investigation provides speech-language pathologists with an overview of how task-related factors may impact adolescent language performance. These findings may be used to support their clinical decision-making processes in choosing a suitable discourse task when conducting a comprehensive spoken language assessment. Three hypothetical case examples are used to illustrate the decision-making process.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25761768.

A personal narrative intervention combined with self-monitoring strategies: Outcomes for Mandarin-speaking adolescents with Down syndrome

BACKGROUND

Personal narratives play an essential role in children's social and academic development. However, children with Down syndrome have ongoing challenges with constructing and communicating personal narratives.

METHODS

Using a single-case multiple-probe across participants design, we examined whether a targeted intervention could improve both micro- and macro-structural aspects of personal narratives from Chinese adolescents with Down syndrome.

RESULTS

All three participants demonstrated high treatment effects in two macrostructural narrative outcomes (i.e., narrative element complexity and narrative coherence) in response to the intervention and moderate to high treatment effects in the microstructural narrative outcomes (i.e., the mean length of utterance in words and the number of different words). However, all participants demonstrated limited improvements in narrative cohesion. These effects were maintained and generalised in a different narrative condition.

CONCLUSIONS

The preliminary findings support the feasibility and effectiveness of the personal narrative intervention incorporated with self-monitoring strategies for adolescents with Down syndrome.

Developing expressive language skills of deaf students through specialized writing instruction

Writing is an essential element of literacy development, and language plays a central role in the composing process, including developing, organizing, and refining ideas. Language and writing are interconnected, making it paramount for educators to attend to the development of deaf students' language skills. In this quasi-experimental study, we examined the impact of strategic and interactive pedagogical approaches, namely Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction, implemented with deaf students in grades 3-6 to develop genre-specific traits in their expressive language (spoken or signed) and writing. In this study, a total of 16 teachers and their 69 students participated in the treatment and comparison groups. Expressive language and writing samples were collected at the beginning and end of the year for three different genres. Students in the treatment group showed statistically significant gains in their expressive and written language for recount and information genres when compared to students in the comparison group. There was not a significant treatment effect on persuasive expressive language or writing. In addition, there was a significant positive correlation between expressive language and writing at both time points across all three genres. This study provides evidence on the importance of attending to language skills during literacy instruction.

Applying a Developmental Model to Preliterate Aided Language Learning

PURPOSE

Childhood spoken language interventions and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) interventions share a common purpose: maximizing communication and language outcomes. To ensure that interventions for children who require AAC also address expressive language acquisition, this clinical focus article focuses on how to apply a developmental model of language acquisition to guide AAC decision making for preliterate aided communicators, with a particular focus on vocabulary selection.

METHOD

A brief review of early expressive language development is presented, along with arguments for why relying on a developmental model to guide AAC decision making is so critical. A series of detailed examples of how to apply a developmental model to various AAC vocabulary selection approaches are provided, including analyses of how well each approach aligns with pragmatic, semantic, grammatical, and narrative development.

CONCLUSIONS

No single AAC approach for preliterate AAC language learners adequately addresses both immediate and longer-term expressive language needs; every approach has both strengths and weaknesses. Clinical decision making requires an analysis of each approach to ensure that AAC service delivery teams clearly understand the inevitable linguistic gaps, with plans put into place to fill in those gaps with different approaches. Future efforts to improve preliterate AAC service provision should use a developmental model of language as a starting point, in combination with input from families, educators, and clinicians to ensure the feasibility of the chosen approaches.

Personal Narratives of School-Age Children: A Cross-Sectional Developmental Study

INTRODUCTION

Personal narratives are monological stories based on a personal experience that help children explain and understand their emotional states, as well as process positive and negative experiences. The aim of this study was to identify age- and emotion-related traits of lexical and grammatical abilities and coherence of personal stories produced by school-aged children between 7 and 13 years.

METHODS

A total of 60 typically developing children, speakers of Croatian, were stratified into three groups according to age. Using the Global TALES protocol, each child was asked to produce six personal stories prompted by different emotional states. The personal narratives were analysed using measures of lexical diversity (lemma-token ratio and number of different words), productivity (total number of words), and syntactic complexity (mean length of utterances and clausal density). Based on the Narrative Coherence Coding Scheme, three coherence dimensions (context, chronology, and theme) were rated.

RESULTS

Age group was shown to explain 18% of the variance in the ability to produce personal narratives. Personal narratives elicited through positive prompts were overall more lexically diverse but were significantly less elaborated chronologically and thematically than negative and neutral narratives.

CONCLUSION

This study showed that coherence of the produced stories was connected with the child's lexicon and that both variables - lexicon and coherence - were influenced by emotional valence of the story. In contrast, grammatical aspects of the narrative were influenced only by age. Finally, it is possible to state that the Global TALES protocol is sensitive enough to capture specificities of creating personal stories, both developmental ones and those created under the influence of the emotional valence of the prompts.

Photographs and Parent Training to Support Conversations about Past Events between Caregivers and Children with Autism

Objectives

Children with autism spectrum disorder experience communication difficulties that can make it challenging to engage in conversations. Their caregivers also often struggle with finding ways to support the child's communication. Parent-implemented interventions and visual supports are evidence-based practices to support the communication skills of children with autism.

Method

A multi-method design (single-case multiple probe and qualitative) was used to evaluate the effects of family photographs, training, and telecoaching on parental implementation of communication strategies. Three parents and their children with and at risk for autism participated.

Results

Results indicate that the use of photographs increased the communication strategies used by all parents. Telecoaching further increased the overall strategy use for two parents. Interviews with the parents indicate spontaneous generalization and maintenance of strategy use.

Conclusion

Family photos and naturalistic developmental behavior intervention approaches have the potential to improve communication about past events between parents and children with and at risk for ASD.

Narrative retells in Swedish school-aged children - a clinical pilot study

AIM

The aim of this pilot study was to evaluate two new retelling tasks intended for clinical use in terms of language sample size, effects of picture support, and order of presentation.

METHODS

Forty Swedish-speaking children in grades 4-6 participated in the study, 31 children with typical language development (TLD, mean age 11;1), and nine children with developmental language disorder (DLD, mean age 11;5). Two oral retells, one with and one without picture support, were analyzed with regards to productivity, syntactic complexity, basic Story Grammar (SG) units, and Internal Responses (IR).

RESULTS

Results showed no systematic order effects in the TLD group, although this needs to be investigated further, and good inter-rater reliability. Both tasks elicited sufficiently large language samples, except from one participant with DLD whose samples were excluded from subsequent comparisons. When appropriate, data were analyzed with ANOVA (productivity, mean length of C-unit/MLCU), otherwise t-tests (TLD-group) or non-parametric tests (DLD-group) were used. As expected, retells from participants with DLD were shorter, with shorter MLCU and fewer SG units compared to the TLD group. There were also task effects: in the task with picture support, all participants had longer MLCU, and participants with TLD also showed a higher proportion of subordinate clauses, indicating that pictures may function as a support for syntactic complexity. The task without picture support, on the other hand, elicited more C-units indicated by a significant main effect, and more SG units, which was a significant effect in the TLD group.

CONCLUSIONS

>We conclude that both tasks might be useful for Swedish speech-language pathologists.

A Personal Narrative Intervention for Adults With Autism and Intellectual Disability

Due to the unique social cognitive profiles of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with and without intellectual disability (ID) sharing coherent and complex personal narratives can be challenging. To address these challenges research has focused on teaching macrostructure components using visual supports and repeated opportunities to practice. Despite success by young children with ASD and ID, the application of this instruction for adults with ASD with and without ID is still largely unknown. An ABAB single case withdrawal design was used to determine the effects of a personal narrative intervention to teach macrostructure within participant-generated personal narratives. Results indicate all participants demonstrated more coherent and complex personal narratives with the intervention. The results and implications for practice are discussed.

Development of a Manualized Intervention to Support Episodic Memory in Autistic Children: Elaborative Reminiscing Is Key

Episodic memory (EM) is memory for past personal experiences. EM and social development are inextricably linked, and both are impacted in autistic persons. Parents of autistic children can be taught to engage in a unique conversational style (i.e., elaborative reminiscing) to support a child's memory and social development. This article discusses the importance of EM in autism and describes a new manualized caregiver training to support EM in autistic children. An uncontrolled pre-post study design was employed to test proof of concept. Results affirmed the potential of this intervention for increasing caregivers' elaborateness and improving children's EM in a family-centered, naturalistic way. Results suggest that further treatment development and examination of effectiveness are needed. We argue that these kinds of intervention are important: not only is EM theoretically potent for social cognitive development, it is essential for a sense of self-determination, social connection, and psychological well-being.

How do students with intellectual disabilities tell stories? An investigation of narrative macrostructure and microstructure

Individuals with intellectual disability may have limited narrative skills. The novelty of this study lies in the examination of strengths and weaknesses which may enable a more facilitative approach to narrative and other storytelling‐based methodologies among adults with intellectual disability who study in an academic enrichment program in comparison to typical students with the same chronological age. Seventeen adult students with intellectual disability and 16 typically developing students, produced narratives which were examined for microstructure (e.g., length, lexis, grammaticality, and complexity) macrostructure (e.g., goals, attempts, and outcomes) and Internal state terms (ISTs). The findings indicate that in spite of weakness of adults with intellectual disability in terms of coherence, syntactic complexity, and grammatical sentences, they exhibit strengths in narrative macrostructure story scheme and use IST. With increasing age, narratives performance of adults with intellectual disability continues to advance possibly due to maturity, life experience and indirect exposure to the environment.

Feasible and Effective Language Intervention Strategies that Accelerate Students' Academic Achievement

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who work in schools are responsible for delivering intervention that improves language abilities but has an impact on academic outcomes. To accomplish this, SLPs need feasible and effective strategies that can be readily incorporated into clinical practice. In this article, we describe two ways that SLPs can deliver intervention that can improve language abilities and academic outcomes: choosing academic language targets and providing language intervention contextualized in the academic curriculum.

Autobiographical Memory in Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Hearing Loss, and Childhood Trauma: Implications for Social Communication Intervention

Purpose Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) work with a variety of populations at risk for poor autobiographical and episodic memory. The purpose of this tutorial is to describe autobiographical memory and how it is affected in children with autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, hearing loss, and childhood trauma, as well as provide clinicians with practical strategies for supporting autobiographical memory in each of these clinical populations. Method This tutorial reviews the literature on (a) autobiographical and episodic memory in typical development; (b) its relation to theory of mind, personal narrative skills, and executive functions; (c) elaborative reminiscing in typical development; (d) how autobiographical memory is impaired in children with autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, hearing loss, and childhood trauma; and (e) strategies for supporting autobiographical memory in each clinical population. Conclusions When adequately prepared, SLPs are uniquely situated to address autobiographical and episodic memory in their work with children, families, and related professionals. This is a long-overdue focus of such great clinical import that justifies its inclusion in the traditional training and preparation of SLPs. Adapting elaborative reminiscing strategies for use with various clinical populations is promising for facilitating healthy EM development and related cognitive functions.

Exploration of Psychological Well-Being, Resilience, Ethnic Identity, and Meaningful Events Among a Group of Youth in Northern England: An Autobiographical Narrative Intervention Pilot Study

Background:

Autobiographical narrative (i.e., the process through writing or storytelling where one recalls life experiences and their impact on identity) has been found to effectively help adolescents cope with a range of medical and psychological issues.

Objective. :

The current study addressed the overall preliminary research question: How does implementing an autobiographical narrative approach promote resilience, psychological well- being, and ethnic identity among adolescents? A secondary study aim was to explore how central the memories evoked by each workshop were to participant identity. The study’s third goal was to promote life skill development and self-awareness through participation in the autobiographical narrative intervention.

Methods:

The intervention incorporated a community-based participatory research (CBPR) framework in its partnership with a community centre in Northern England. The intervention consisted of an 8-week autobiographical program with youth participants from working and lower middle-class backgrounds. Socioeconomic status was operationalized by self-report on a demographic data sheet completed by participants.

Results.:

Analyses indicated that participants viewed the events discussed in the 8-week program as being more central to their lives after their participation. Maladaptive coping appeared to decrease after participation in the intervention.

Conclusion:

Results suggest interventions that incorporate an autobiographical narrative approach within a CBPR framework may promote positive outcomes among adolescents with limited economic resources.

The Development of a New Test for Consecutive Assessment of Narrative Skills in Iranian School-Age Children

BACKGROUND

The assessment of narrative skills in young children is essential for early identification of potential learning and literacy-related difficulties. The present study aimed to develop a validated and reliable test for consecutive assessment of narrative skills in Iranian school-age children.

METHODS

To elicit story retelling by the children, 14 pictures (each a discrete test) were developed based on which 14 stories were scripted in accordance with the Stein and Glenn model. The pictures were presented to 50 typically developing (TD) children and seven children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Kerman, Iran, 2018. The recorded audio of retold stories by the children was transcribed and analyzed using the monitoring indicator of scholarly language (MISL) instrument. The SPSS software (Version: 18.0) was used to analyze the data with the significance level set at 0.05.

RESULTS

A high correlation between the total MISL score of each test and each MISL item (r>0.5) confirmed the construct validity of our test. A comparison of the mean total MISL score between the TD and ASD groups showed significant differences (P<0.001) for all pictures. The internal consistency coefficient was >0.7 between all the MISL items and the intraclass correlation coefficient between the test and retest scores was >0.96 for all pictures. The repeated measures ANOVA did not indicate significant differences (P=0.15) between the total MISL scores of the pictures.

CONCLUSION

The validity and reliability of the developed test were confirmed, suggesting it can be used for consecutive assessment and monitoring of the narrative skills in school-aged children.

Narrative Intervention: Principles to Practice

Purpose

Narrative interventions are a class of language interventions that involve the use of telling or retelling stories. Narrative intervention can be an efficient and versatile means of promoting a large array of academically and socially important language targets that improve children's access to general education curriculum and enhance their peer relations. The purpose of this tutorial is to supply foundational information about the importance of narratives and to offer recommendations about how to maximize the potential of narrative interventions in school-based clinical practice.

Method

Drawing from decades of cognitive and linguistic research, a tutorial on narratives and narrative language is presented first. Ten principles that support the design and implementation of narrative interventions are described.

Results

Clinicians can use narrative intervention to teach story grammar, complex language, vocabulary, inferencing, and social pragmatics. Storytelling, as an active intervention ingredient, promotes the comprehension and production of complex language.

Conclusion

When narrative intervention is implemented following a set of principles drawn from research and extensive clinical experience, speech-language pathologists can efficiently and effectively teach a broad set of academically and socially meaningful skills to diverse students.

Sampling Utterances and Grammatical Analysis Revised (SUGAR): Quantitative Values for Language Sample Analysis Measures in 7- to 11-Year-Old Children

Purpose The purpose of this study was to document whether mean length of utterance_SUGAR (MLU_S), total number of words (TNW), clauses per sentence (CPS), and/or words per sentence (WPS) demonstrated age-related changes in children with typically developing language, aged 7;0-10;11 (years;months). Method Participants were 132 typically developing children (aged 7;0-10;11), with a final sample size of 112 participants (57 boys and 55 girls). Fifty utterance conversational language samples were collected using a language sampling protocol. Four language sample analysis metrics (i.e., MLU_S, TNW, CPS, and WPS) were calculated from the samples. Results Results indicated statistically significant age-related increases in three (MLU_S, TNW, and WPS) of the four metrics. Conclusions MLU_S, TNW, CPS, and WPS may be used with other assessment data to document age-related language changes in children aged 7;0-10;11. When combined with previous data from younger (aged 3;0-7;11) children (Pavelko & Owens, 2017), the data suggest that these metrics offer a set of measures that can be used to assess children's conversational language skills from preschool through late elementary school.

Decontextualized talk in caregivers' input to 12-month-old children during structured interaction

Decontextualized talk is assumed to be used only rarely when children are younger than 30 months. Motivated by Bühler's (1934/1999) linguistic theory that describes different dimensions of (de-)contextualization, we provide evidence that this kind of input can already be found in caregivers' talking to their 12-month-old children. Such early input is characterized by being decontextualized on some dimensions while being grounded in the immediate context on others. In this way, parents may scaffold understanding of talk about the there-and-then. We also examined whether caregivers adapt decontextualized verbal input to individual trajectories in language development. We observed 59 parent-child interactions within a decorated room when children were 12 months old, and assessed the children's linguistic development at 12 and 24 months of age. However, we did not find differences in the input directed toward children with different trajectories in language development.

Evaluating Personal Stroke Narratives from Bilingual Greek-English Immigrants with Aphasia

OBJECTIVE

For people with aphasia (PWA) and their significant others, narratives are intricately intertwined with quality of life, culture, and social participation. This paper reports stories told by bilingual people with aphasia (bPWA), describing the events or consequences of a stroke on their lives.

PATIENTS AND METHODS

Six participants with chronic mild-moderate anomia (mean age 70 years) spontaneously produced a narrative recounting their personal experience of stroke in their native language (Greek) and in their second language (English). All bPWA had learned English in early adulthood upon migration from Greece to Australia, not through formal teaching but on the job (e.g., in the factory). The bPWA had lived in Australia for 46 years (average) and were less than 4 years post-stroke.

RESULTS

Narratives in the two languages underwent quantitative (number of propositions, noun/verb tokens) and qualitative analyses (ratings of coherence, ratings of clarity). Most bPWA produced coherent "tellable" stories despite disruptions in language because of aphasia. Overall, stories were better told (length, complexity of content, temporal-causal sequencing, reference) in Greek - their native language.

CONCLUSION

The results have implications for policy-makers providing health and welfare services to ageing immigrant populations. The findings are also relevant to other countries that have large immigrant populations of stroke survivors.

Bridging Oral and Written Language: An Oral Narrative Language Intervention Study With Writing Outcomes

Purpose

Despite literature showing a correlation between oral language and written language ability, there is little evidence documenting a causal connection between oral and written language skills. The current study examines the extent to which oral language instruction using narratives impacts students' writing skills.

Method

Following multiple baseline design conventions to minimize threats to internal validity, 3 groups of 1st-grade students were exposed to staggered baseline, intervention, and maintenance conditions. During the intervention condition, groups received 6 sessions of small-group oral narrative instruction over 2 weeks. Separated in the school day from the instruction, students wrote their own stories, forming the dependent variable across baseline, intervention, and maintenance conditions. Written stories were analyzed for story structure and language complexity using a narrative scoring flow chart based on current academic standards.

Results

Corresponding to the onset of oral narrative instruction, all but 1 student showed meaningful improvements in story writing. All 4 students, for whom improvements were observed and maintenance data were available, continued to produce written narratives above baseline levels once the instruction was withdrawn.

Conclusions

Results suggest that narrative instruction delivered exclusively in an oral modality had a positive effect on students' writing. Implications include the efficiency and inclusiveness of oral language instruction to improve writing quality, especially for young students.

Using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health in Assessment and Intervention of School-Aged Children With Language Impairments

Purpose

The aim of this tutorial is to support speech-language pathologists' (SLPs') application of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) in assessment and treatment practices with children with language impairment.

Method

This tutorial reviews the framework of the ICF, describes the implications of the ICF for SLPs, distinguishes between students' capacity to perform a skill in a structured context and the actual performance of that skill in naturalistic contexts, and provides a case study of an elementary school child to demonstrate how the principles of the ICF can guide assessment and intervention.

Implications

The Scope of Practice and Preferred Practice documents for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association identify the ICF as the framework for practice in speech-language pathology. This tutorial will facilitate clinicians' ability to identify personal and environmental factors that influence students' skill capacity and skill performance, assess students' capacity and performance, and develop impairment-based and socially based language goals linked to Common Core State Standards that build students' language capacity and their communicative performance in naturalistic contexts.

Using Experience Books to Foster the Narrative Skills of English Learners

The need to address the language and literacy development of children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds continues to rise with the increasing number of English learners (ELs) in schools throughout the United States. One area of concern is the need for culturally sensitive methods of assessment and intervention for ELs with language disorders. Oral language skills are widely considered an essential component of later reading success. Although narratives are commonly used to foster children's oral language skills, narrative development in children from CLD backgrounds can be highly variable. Broader socialization and cultural practices can influence and shape the way children tell stories (Melzi, Schick, & Kennedy, 2011). One approach to facilitate the development of narrative skills in ELs with language disorders is the use of experience books, which are personalized stories that depict daily routines or meaningful events situated from the child's perspective. Experience books can provide a natural foundation of rich linguistic interactions between children and caregivers, increase children's exposure to print and enjoyment of books, and encourage family involvement. The following tutorial will guide speech-language pathologists on how to adapt experience books as culturally sensitive tools to help meet the needs and interests of CLD children and families.