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 bilingual children with DLD with differing degrees of proficiency with English or Spanish. This project will examine the relationship between relative language proficiency and the language of intervention, considering monolingual intervention in English and Spanish and bilingual intervention presented by alternating English and Spanish treatment sessions with the goal of improving language outcomes and thereby strengthening long-term academic achievement.
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. Using the best-language approach, these scores have a sensitivity over 90% and specificity over 80% for children between 4;0 and 6;11 years of age , which is considered acceptable for studies of diagnostic accuracy.
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
1) children with significant sensory-motor concerns or psychiatric disorders per parent report will not be enrolled.
Crossover
Sentence recast
BehavioralRecast 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 .
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.
Number of target structure (conditional or nominal) produced during a story retell task
Language samples serve as a means to assess functional change. Narratives are more likely than conversation to elicit complex syntactic forms while still being appropriate for this age range. Children will provide one story retell in each language before, at midpoint, and after treatment. Frog books from Mercer Meyer with story-retell scripts developed for this study will be used. The investigators will obtain the number of target utterances used in each language.
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University of Houston
Lead sponsor
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Collaborator
University of Delaware
Collaborator
