Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions for Developmental Language Disorder

Purpose: Naturalistic-developmental-behavioral interventions (NDBIs) are a widely accepted and validated approach for treating language-related symptoms in autism spectrum disorder, including deficits in vocabulary, social skills, and grammar. The purpose of this article is to define the elements naturalistic, developmental, and behavioral as applied to children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and to provide an example of how this type of intervention can be implemented to teach vocabulary and test cross-modal generalization between expressive and receptive modalities. Method: A vocabulary intervention using hybrid NDBI methods (storybook reading and conversational recast interaction) was provided to three participants with DLD using a single-case design. Results: The results indicated that all participants successfully learned receptive and expressive vocabulary targets with extensive cross-modal generalization. However, generalization was limited in some of the participants. Conclusions: This article provided definitions of key elements of NDBI (naturalistic, developmental, and behavioral) including a rationale for extending NDBI procedures to language intervention for children with DLD. In addition, a single-case design demonstrated that NDBI can be implemented in DLD and that broadly defined naturalistic-developmental applied behavior analysis techniques are applicable to language interventions for children with language disorders. Moreover, diverse naturalistic and developmental procedures meet the highest standards for evidence-based practice to treat DLD.