Treating Passive Sentence Structure in Children with Developmental Language Disorder
This study is looking for 150 children aged 8 to 11 years old with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) to compare two ways of teaching them about passive sentence structures. One method, called "Grammar Treatment," is an implicit approach where children listen to sentences and describe pictures. The other is a more traditional explicit approach that teaches the rules of grammar. The goal is to see which method is better at helping children understand and use passive sentences. Researchers will measure how well children comprehend sentences, how their brains process sentence structures (sentence priming), and how they break down sentences into meaningful parts (sentence chunking) at the beginning, right after treatment, and up to 5 weeks later. To join, children must have a language impairment, a nonverbal IQ of 77 or higher, normal hearing and vision, be native English speakers, and have difficulty with sentence comprehension or chunking. Children with other neurodevelopmental or emotional/behavioral disorders cannot participate. The study's status is currently unclear.
- Study design
- This is an interventional study with a planned enrollment of 150 participants. It will compare two different behavioral interventions for grammar treatment.
- What's involved
- Not specified in the trial record.
- Compensation
- Not stated in the trial record.
- Follow-up
- Participants will be assessed twice after treatment, immediately following and up to 5 weeks post-treatment.
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Treating Passive Structure Knowledge Deficits in School-Age Children With Developmental Language Disorder
At a glance
Conditions
NCT06932016
Where you'd take part
This study runs at 4 sites. They're the same protocol — you choose where, and that choice sets who your contact draft is addressed to.
Ohio University
Athens, Ohiostudy coordinator listed
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizonastudy coordinator listed
Utah State University
Logan, Utahstudy coordinator listed
West Virginia University
Morgantown, West Virginiastudy coordinator listed
Sites open and close at different times, so the status above is per site — it can differ from the study's overall status.
Who to contact
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What this trial measures
- Sentence ComprehensionComprehension is assessed at baseline and twice at post-test, immediately following treatment and up to 5 weeks post-treatment.
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 PrimingSyntactic knowledge is assessed at baseline and twice at post-test, immediately following treatment and up to 5 weeks post-treatment.
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 ChunkingSentence chunking is assessed at baseline and twice at post-test, immediately following treatment and up to 5 weeks post-treatment.
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/RetellNarrative comprehension/retell is assessed at baseline and twice at post-test, immediately following treatment and up to 5 weeks post-treatment.
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%).
- Working MemoryWorking memory is assessed at baseline and twice at post-test, immediately after treatment and up to 5 weeks post-treatment.
This measure assesses participants' working memory capacity/span while performing a cognitive activity, i.e., listening to lists of words and digits presented in random order at different list lengths (2-8 items) and then first recalling the words in serial order followed by the digits in serial order. The primary dependent variable is memory span (1.0 items-8.0 items).