Development of a Cognitive Rehabilitation -Based Language Skills Enhancement Package and Its Effect on Receptive Language Performance in Children with Specific Language Impairment

 Language is one of the most important components of child development. Therefore, the present research aimed to develop a language skills enhancement package based on cognitive rehabilitation and determine its effectiveness on the receptive language performance of children with specific language impairments.

 The current research employed a mixed-method sequential exploratory design. The qualitative population consisted of relevant books and scientific articles. In the qualitative phase, data were collected through deductive thematic analysis and then a set of interventions was developed over 12 sessions, and its content validity was confirmed. The quantitative research population included all 5 to 7-year-old children with specific language impairments who were referred to speech therapy centers in the city of Borujerd, among whom 30 children were purposefully selected and randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups. The tools used included the Wechsler Children's Intelligence Scale, semi-structured clinical interviews, and the Newcomer and Hamill Language Growth Test. The data were analyzed using repeated measures analysis of variance with SPSS-24 software.

The results showed that the language skills enhancement package based on cognitive rehabilitation with a Content Validity Ratio(CVR) between 0.80 and 1 and a Content Validity Index(CVI) between 0.795 and 0.875 had desirable content validity. Additionally, there was a significant difference in expressive language performance between the experimental and control groups in the pre-test, post-test, and follow-up stages(p < 0.01). In other words, the cognitive rehabilitation-based language skills enhancement package improved the receptive language performance of children with specific language impairments, with an effect size of 0.64.

 Considering the effectiveness of the cognitive rehabilitation-based language skills enhancement package on the receptive language performance of children with specific language impairment, it is recommended to focus on the cognitive nature of language in the treatment of language disorders and utilize the above intervention package as an intervention method in educational and therapeutic centers.