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A Preliminary Evaluation of Fast-ForWord-Language as an Adjuvant Treatment in Language Intervention

Jeffrey D. Lewine
Alexian Brothers Medical Center

Correspondence should be addressed to Marc E. Fey, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Hearing and Speech, University of Kansas Medical Center, 3901 Rainbow Blvd., Kansas City, KS 66160-7605, phone: 913-588-5937, e-mail: mfey{at}kumc.edu.

Rationale: Fast ForWord-Language (FFW-L) is designed to enhance children's processing of auditory-verbal signals, and thus, their ability to learn language. As a preliminary evaluation of this claim, we examined the effects of a 5-week course of FFW-L as an adjuvant treatment with a subsequent 5-week conventional narrative based language intervention (NBLI) that targeted narrative comprehension and production and grammatical output.

Method: Twenty-three, 6- to 8-year-old children with language impairments were assigned randomly to one of three intervention sequences: (1) FFW-L/NBLI; (2) NBLI/FFW-L; and (3) Wait/NBLI. We predicted that after both treatment periods, the FFW-L/NBLI group would show greater gains on measures of narrative ability, conversational grammar, and nonword repetition than either other group.

Results: After the first 5-week study period, the intervention groups, taken together (i.e., FFWL/NBLI and NBLI/FFW-L), significantly outperformed the no treatment Wait/NBLI group on two narrative measures. At the final test period, all three groups displayed significant time-related effects on measures of narrative ability, but there were no statistically significant between-group effects of intervention sequence.

Conclusions: This preliminary study provides no evidence to support the claim that FFW-L enhances children's response to a conventional language intervention.

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