Currently, little evidence exists for the effectiveness of intervention for older adolescents and young adults with language disorders, particularly for those over 16 years old.

The study, by Lisa Campbell and Hilary Nicoll, both Highly Specialist Speech and Language Therapists, and Dr Susan Ebbels, Director of Moor House Research and Training Institute, investigated progress in word finding following 1:1 semantic intervention with 25 college students (20 males and 5 females). 

It concluded that four hours of semantic intervention led to significantly greater gains on a standardised test of word finding than during a baseline period of equal length.  

The findings show that intervention (at least for Word-Finding Difficulties) can be effective for college-aged students and therefore the effectiveness of Speech and Language Therapy services for this age group in a wider range of areas of language should also be investigated.

The published research is free to access and available to view here