Treating Passive Structures in Children With Developmental Language Disorder
Ohio University
Summary
The goal of this project is to compare the relative effectiveness of two novel treatments to improve the knowledge of the passive sentence structure of school-age (8-11-year-old) children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Treatment 1 is an implicit approach to promoting children's automatic grammar learning and Treatment 2 is a more conventional explicit approach in which participants are taught the rules underlying the grammar. Treatment 1 involves children listening to an examiner produce a target sentence 20 times during each training session while describing a picture. The children will then see a picture and be asked to describe the action taking place. Treatment 2 involves children listening to an examiner describe the action occurring in a picture using a sentence pattern targeted to the child's deficit. The child will then be asked who did the action in the sentence and who received the action, after which the examiner will provide specific feedback about why the child's response was correct or incorrect. The expectation is that over a short period children will begin to use their targeted sentence pattern after hearing the examiner produce it many times. Children will complete four outcome measures (syntactic knowledge, sentence comprehension, sentence chunking, narrative comprehension/ production) prior to treatment, immediately after treatment, and five weeks after treatment. Children will be randomly assigned to one of the two treatments. Both treatments will be delivered 20 times over 10 weeks. The investigators anticipate that the children receiving Treatment 1 will show stronger gains in knowledge across the four outcome measures.
Description
AIMS For later-developing language skills, including those involving complex sentence forms, there are not only very few treatment studies, but effect sizes for the few that exist are quite modest. The investigators propose that the unexceptional treatment outcomes may be attributed to two issues: 1) the reliance on treatment methods that were developed primarily for preschoolers and that lie on the more explicit end of an implicit-to-explicit treatment continuum and 2) treatments that ignore the mapping of semantic roles to the main nouns that express the agent-patient relationship. The inve…
Eligibility
- Age range
- 8–11 years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- No
Inclusion Criteria: * Language impairment: standard score of 34 or lower on the Test of Language and Learning Skills * Nonverbal IQ: nonverbal quotient of 77 or higher * Normal range hearing * Normal or corrected vision * Native English speaker * Sentence comprehension screening/sentence chunking screening 50% or lower Exclusion Criteria: * Neurodevelopmental disorder * Emotional/behavioral disorder * Frank neurological disorder * Treatment for complex syntax from outside clinician
Interventions
- BehavioralGrammar Treatment
Behavioral intervention that focuses on improving passive sentence structure knowledge.
Locations (4)
- University of ArizonaTucson, Arizona
- Ohio UniversityAthens, Ohio
- Utah State UniversityLogan, Utah
- West Virginia UniversityMorgantown, West Virginia