Emergent Bilinguals: Child Language Proficiency and Language of Treatment

ConditionsDevelopmental Language Disorder Language Impairment

Trial statusRecruiting

Trial phaseNot applicable

Trial typeInterventional

Biological sexAll

Age4-6

SponsorUniversity of Houston

About this trial

Of the 12 million children in the USA growing up bilingual, about 1 million experience Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), a disorder in language learning and use. Currently there is no guidance for speech language pathologists (SLPs) as to the language of intervention for emergent Spanish-English bilingual children with DLD. This project will examine the relationship between language proficiency and the language of intervention, considering monolingual intervention (Spanish or English) and interleaved Spanish-English intervention with the goal of improving language outcomes and thereby strengthening long-term academic achievement

Eligibility criteria

This trial accepts healthy volunteers

Qualifiers

parent concerns and/or a history of receiving services in the public schools

age-specific cutoffs for the morphosyntax subtests for their best language (English or Spanish) on the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment. The cut-off score for best language for 4-year-olds is 84, for 5-year-olds is 85, and for 6-year-olds is 81.

nonverbal IQ, as measured by the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test-2, matrices subtest, will be at or above a standard score of 70.

pass a hearing screening test

Disqualifiers

None

Trial design

Design model

Crossover

Treatments tested in this trial

Sentence recast
Behavioral
Recast therapy is a well-established treatment for grammar in children with DLD. In this treatment, the adult repeats the child's own utterance, altering it to include the taught structure. It yields consistent large effect sizes (Hedge's g = 0.7-1.0) when focused on a single target and provided at a high dose (10-20 hrs. of therapy at a rate of \~1 recast/minute or \~600-1000 recasts total) for both morphology and syntax

Treatment groups

40 Participants

are divided into 2 treatment groups

Group A: Monolingual therapyExperimental treatment 1 intervention

Group B: Interleaved therapyExperimental treatment 1 intervention

Trial outcomes

Primary outcomes

Accuracy on elicited production probes (conditional or nominal)

Accuracy on elicited production probes are the primary outcome measure. There are 40 probes in total. Ten for Spanish conditionals, ten English conditionals, ten Spanish complement clauses and ten English complement clauses.

Time frame

~1 month before (Pre), 2 weeks before second structure (Mid) and 2 weeks after treatment (Post test)]

Secondary outcomes

Mean Length of Utterance and Subordination Index in English

Calculated from a story retell in English. Mean length of utterance and subordination index.

Time frame

~1 month before (Pre), 2 weeks before second structure (Mid) and 2 weeks after treatment (Post test)]

Sponsors and contacts

Click on the lead sponsor to view all of their trials.

University of Houston

Lead sponsor

National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)

Collaborator

University of Delaware