Distance delivery of a spoken language intervention for school-aged and adolescent boys with fragile X syndrome

A small randomized group design (N = 20) was used to examine a parent-implemented intervention designed to improve the spoken language skills of school-aged and adolescent boys with FXS, the leading cause of inherited intellectual disability. The intervention was implemented by speech-language pathologists who used distance video-teleconferencing to deliver the intervention. The intervention taught mothers to use a set of language facilitation strategies while interacting with their children in the context of shared story-telling. Treatment group mothers significantly improved their use of the targeted intervention strategies. Children in the treatment group increased the duration of engagement in the shared story-telling activity as well as use of utterances that maintained the topic of the story. Children also showed increases in lexical diversity, but not in grammatical complexity.