Treating Passive Structure Knowledge Deficits in School-Age Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Conditions

• Developmental Language Disorders

Eligibility Criteria

Sex

ALL

Age

8 Years - 11 Years

Healthy Volunteers

Not accepted

Interventions

• Grammar Treatment — BEHAVIORAL
  Behavioral intervention that focuses on improving passive sentence structure knowledge.

Study Details

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.

Key Dates

Start date

Sep 1, 2026

Status verified

Mar 2025

Primary completion

Jan 31, 2029

Completion

Jan 31, 2029

Study Design

Enrollment

150 participants (estimated)

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Intervention model

PARALLEL

Primary purpose

TREATMENT

Arms

• Experimental: Implicit Immediate Treatment
  This treatment involves providing participants an implicit approach to passive sentence structure learning via a syntactic priming paradigm immediately following the completion of the pre-treatment measures.
• Experimental: Implicit Delayed Treatment
  This treatment involves providing participants an implicit approach to passive sentence structure learning via a syntactic priming paradigm 10 weeks following the completion of the pre-treatment measures. This arm allows assessing whether improvement on the outcome measures is due to 10 weeks of treatment or just maturation.
• Experimental: Explicit Immediate Treatment
  This treatment involves providing participants an explicit approach to passive sentence structure learning via conventional teaching of grammatical rules immediately following the completion of the pre-treatment measures.
• Experimental: Explicit Delayed Treatment
  This treatment involves providing participants an explicit approach to passive sentence structure learning via conventional teaching of grammar rules 10 weeks following the completion of the pre-treatment measures. This arm allows assessing whether improvement on the outcome measures is due to 10 weeks of treatment or just maturation.

Primary Outcome Measure

Sentence Comprehension [ Time Frame: Comprehension is assessed at baseline and twice at post-test, immediately following treatment and up to 5 weeks post-treatment. ]

Central Contacts

• James Montgomery
  740-593-1412
  [email protected]

Locations (4)

Find similar trials in Tucson, AZ

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• Treating Complex Grammar Knowledge Deficits in School-Age Children With Developmental Language Disorder
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