The Relationship Between Child Language Proficiency and Language of Treatment on the Outcomes of Bilingual Children with Developmental Language Disorder
University of Houston
120 participants
Aug 8, 2023
INTERVENTIONAL
Conditions
Summary
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.
Eligibility
Inclusion Criteria6
- 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
- participants must be bilingual, that is children must be producing at least simple sentences in spontaneous speech in both Spanish and English, or understand English and Spanish.
- participants must be able to benefit from treatment for both conditional adverbial clauses and complement clauses, as evidenced by accuracy below 40% on 10-item elicited production probes in both languages
Exclusion Criteria1
- \) children with significant sensory-motor concerns or psychiatric disorders per parent report will not be enrolled.
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Interventions
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 .
Locations(1)
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NCT06085300