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.
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
Neurodevelopmental disorder
Emotional/behavioral disorder
Frank neurological disorder
Treatment for complex syntax from outside clinician
Parallel
Grammar Treatment
BehavioralBehavioral intervention that focuses on improving passive sentence structure knowledge.
Sentence Comprehension
This measure assesses participants' comprehension of subject-object and passive sentences in a conventional picture pointing task, i.e., listening to a sentence then pointing to an image that best depicts what is stated in the sentence. The dependent variable is percent accuracy (0% - 100%).
Sentence Priming
This measure assesses participants' knowledge of subject-object and passive sentence structures using a syntactic priming task (i.e., producing the target structure to describe the action occurring in an imagine after hearing the examiner produce the target structure when describing the action occurring in a "prime" imagine). The dependent variable is percent accuracy in producing the target correctly (0% - 100%).
Sentence Chunking
This measure assesses participants' knowledge of subject-object and passive sentence structures using a sentence production task in which participants imitate a sentence spoken by the examiner. The primary dependent variable is the percent accuracy of word recall for each stimulus sentence (0% - 100%).
Narrative Comprehension/Retell
This measure assesses participants' ability to generalize the use of a trained sentence-level target (subject-object or passive structure) to the discourse level by comprehending and retelling stories containing a targeted sentence structure. The primary dependent variables are (a) percent questions comprehended correctly in a story (0% - 100%) and (b) percent target sentences produced correctly (0% -100%).
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Ohio University
Lead sponsor
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Collaborator
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