Poor Syntax and Difficulties with Word Order

Play-Based Modeling Intervention: Particularly for young children, providing language models of desired syntactic structures can be an effective and functionally relevant approach to intervention. In a play context, this is often performed through expansions, recasts, and extensions, (whereby clinicians model restructured versions of children's utterances), by providing numerous models of the target structure(s), and by structuring activities so that specific language structures may be naturalistically compelled. For example, a clinician trying to build a child's use of relative clauses might introduce a play experience featuring similar human figurines that require the child to use distinguishing characteristics to specify particular figurines ("the girl who has the ponytail" "The lady with the classes"). These strategies may be easily modeled to parents for home facilitation, supporting continued carryover. 

Structured Intervention Experiences: Clinician-directed experiences focus the intervention time on specific sentence structures. Through repeated trials or use of visual prompts, these experiences can help children to better conceptualize the target structure and utilize it more intentionally. Such experiences might include narrative retells, sequencing activities, or practice using key phrases or conjunctions (and, but, and then, because). 

Alternative/Societal/Access-Based Approach: Children who have difficulties with word order may struggle to understand multi-step directions delivered within elaborate sentences. While modeling diverse linguisitic structures helps children to build their syntactic skills, these children are better able to cooperate with instructions that are delivered in shorter steps. Furthermore, the word order of instructions given should match the intended chronology of the steps (e.g. "put that in the trash and go wash your hands" rather than "wash your hands after you put that in the trash"). Checking for understanding can also support children with syntactic difficulties to benefit from language experiences.