95 Clinical Trials for Various Conditions
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 emergent Spanish-English bilingual children with DLD. This project will examine the relationship between language proficiency and the language of intervention, considering monolingual intervention (Spanish or English) and interleaved Spanish-English intervention with the goal of improving language outcomes and thereby strengthening long-term academic achievement
Eight deaf children in kindergarten to 3rd grade classes will be randomly selected for single case research. Their language skills will be monitored and assessed daily. Using a noncurrent multiple baseline design (Single Case Research Design or SCRD), Strategic and Interactive Signing Instruction (SISI) will be administered to two children in each of four classes.
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.
Phonological disorder (PD) and specific language impairment (SLI) directly impact a child's ability to communicate and are among the most prevalent developmental disorders. The proposed experiments manipulate the complexity of treatment targets to identify the most efficacious treatment approaches for English- and Spanish-speaking children aged 3 to 6 years who present with these disorders. This research will reveal the nature of interactions between sound and structure in language for these children and will have significant implications for a unique approach to target selection when treating persistent phonological and grammatical difficulties in children with PD, SLI, or both.
The Early Childhood Collaborative of The Pittsburgh Study is a community-partnered, county-wide implementation of programs for children and families from birth through formal school entry to address real-world challenges that exist in providing effective preventive interventions for families with young children, particularly low-income families.
This study is designed to evaluate whether children with Down syndrome and children with typical development exhibit different levels of accuracy demonstrating novel verbs taught under three conditions: semantic cues (perform action), syntactic cues (sentence frame), and combined (syntactic and semantic cues). The participants complete an eligibility evaluation and then one verb learning session (approximately 60 minutes in length). During that verb learning session they are taught sets of words under each condition (i.e., within-subjects design) and then asked to identify and label those target words immediately after instruction.
This study examines the development of American Sign Language by deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children and their parents.
This study is a randomized clinical trial that uses a Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial (SMART) study design. The study will directly compare the efficacy of an innovative intervention that combines explicit and implicit approaches to a traditional implicit treatment approach to teach true grammatical forms to children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The study will also compare interventions that include sequences of Explicit-added and Implicit-only treatments. Participants will include 5- through 9-year-old children with DLD who present with significant grammatical weaknesses. In Phase 1, 155 participants will be randomized 1:1 to an Explicit-added treatment group or an Implicit-only treatment group. Each participant will complete 32 sessions targeting four unique grammatical forms (8 sessions/form). In Phase 2, "Masters" will be re-randomized to receive no treatment 32 sessions of the same treatment, or 32 sessions of the alternative treatment. "Non-Masters" will be re-randomized to receive 32 additional sessions of the same treatment or 32 sessions of the alternative treatment. Performance will be measured on acquisition, maintenance, and generalization probes obtained immediately,1-, 6-, and 12- months post-intervention. The SMART study design will be used to determine if child factors, including expressive and receptive language abilities, nonverbal IQ, and executive function skills can reliably predict the treatment sequence that optimizes language learning. Study results will help to determine the best sequence approach to ameliorate grammatical weaknesses, one of the core deficits of young children with language impairment.
The purpose of the proposed research is to evaluate the Thirty Million Words (TMW) Intervention through a randomized, controlled pilot study. The primary goal of the intervention is to enrich the early language learning environment of children from low-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds by targeting parent skills that relate to adult word input and conversational turn taking. The investigators hypothesize that receiving the TMW intervention will result in changes in parent behaviors.
This exploratory experiment is designed to determine the extent to which the socialization experiences and social, behavioral, and linguistic skills of preschoolers with language impairment (LI) can be improved. The investigators implement a peer-mediated intervention in inclusive preschool classrooms, randomly assigned to treatment (n=12) or control (n=13) conditions. A focal child is identified in each classroom, representing a child with LI (3 to 5 years of age) who exhibits the poorest pragmatic-language skills and highest level of social exclusion in the classroom. Over a 12-week period, the focal children will receive peer-mediated intervention from identified peers, who use strategies to engage the focal child socially during center time, as supported by a classroom facilitator (teacher, aide). Outcomes of interest include the overarching classroom social network and its embedded socialization processes (e.g., frequency of child-to-child interaction), the focal child's interactions with peers and exposure to peer talk, and the focal child's social, behavioral, and linguistic skills. The study employs state-of-the-art social network analyses to represent the classroom network at the child, dyad, and network level and is dynamically modeled over the academic year using advanced location-tracking technologies and voice-activated recorders to capture incoming and outgoing peer talk for the focal child. The investigators anticipate the results of this study to yield significant theoretical and scientific impact. Theoretically, the investigators propose that improved socialization experiences in the preschool classroom can disrupt the social exclusion and peer maltreatment experienced by children with LI, leading to accelerated growth in linguistic, social, and behavioral outcomes for children with LI.
In this study the investigators focus on a subset of at-risk students who find the language of science to be a barrier to the learning of science. These are the nearly 3 million children in the U.S. who have a learning disability called specific language impairment (SLI). Children with SLI present with deficits in spoken grammar and vocabulary and they are 3.9 to 8.1 times more likely to have reading deficits than children in the general population. Specific Aim #1: To determine whether science-relevant language intervention enhances the learning of science concepts in young children who have SLI. Specific Aim #2: To determine whether science-relevant language intervention facilitates generalization of science concepts and practices in young children who have SLI
The purpose of this study is to determine the amount of speech-language intervention children with language impairment need to make vocabulary gains. The investigators hope to identify the optimal amount of intervention needed as well as the point at which adding more intervention is no longer beneficial. Participants will be randomly assigned (like a flip of a coin) to attend therapy either one time a week for 10 weeks (2 hours a session) or 4 times a week for 10 weeks (30 min per session). Each therapy session will follow a word learning intervention that is designed to increase children's word learning abilities using rich, robust word learning strategies within story book readings. The optimal amount of intervention relates to duration, dose, and frequency. Duration refers to how long the child is seen for (e.g., 10 weeks, 1 year). Dose represents the number of exposures to each new vocabulary word within a therapy session. Frequency represents the number of therapy sessions per week. The investigators will test the hypothesis that distributed learning leads to higher gains. The investigators propose that the greatest gains will be observed for children who receive high-frequency/low-dose or low-frequency/high-dose treatments as compared to children who receive high-frequency/high-dose or low-frequency/low-dose treatments. The investigators will test the hypothesis that for both low-frequency and high-frequency treatments, there is a point at which increases in treatment dose do not correspond to any additional gains in children's vocabulary skills during treatment. At the close of this four-year study, evidence concerning optimal treatment intensity of a word learning intervention will be instrumental for immediately informing speech-language pathologists in how much vocabulary treatment to prescribe as well as for designing additional clinical trials by our and other research teams.
The sophisticated language of science can be a barrier to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) learning, especially for children who have specific language impairment (SLI). The purpose of this randomized controlled trial is to test vocabulary and grammar interventions embedded in a small-group inquiry-based science instruction for their potential to ameliorate language deficits that impede science learning. Participants will be 54 preschoolers or kindergartners with SLI. Proximal and distal probes will reveal their mastery of taught and generalized language and science concepts.
This research attempts to adapt and optimize a word learning treatment, specifically interactive book reading, for use with Kindergarten children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Children with SLI have difficulty learning language without any obvious cause for this difficulty. This study will examine the best way to achieve the appropriate intensity of 36 exposures. For example, is it better to hear the new words many times within the book (high dose) and to read the book few times (low dose frequency), or is it better to hear the new words a few times within the book (low dose) and to read the book many times (high dose frequency). The investigators hypothesize that reading the books many times will be more effective than repeating the words many times within a book.
The goal of this clinical trial is to learn if the Talk With Me Baby (TWMB) program improves the home-language environment for at-risk families with children ages two to six months when primary care providers deliver the program during well-child checkups. The main question it aims to answer is: Will the TWMB program increase the time a caregiver talks to their infant? Participants will: 1. Come to at least four well-child checkups 2. Receive the TWMB program from the provider during the checkups 3. Record their conversations with their infant before they receive the program and after they receive the program four times.
Caregiver-child language interactions in the first three years of life predict early language development, school readiness, and academic achievement. Despite the importance of these factors, there are disparities in the frequency and quality of children's early language interactions. Although there is within-group variability, children from low-income families, on average, have fewer and lower-quality language experiences than their middle- or high-income peers. The current study addresses a need in the community for an early language intervention accessible to low-income families who speak Spanish. This study will build upon research conducted in a previous study, "Enhancing the Communication Foundation-The Duet Project", by piloting the English and Spanish modules with families through a light-touch, remote intervention delivery model. Temple University Health System's Department of Pediatrics will aid in identifying participants. Baseline and follow-up measures will be used to evaluate caregiver knowledge of child development, psychosocial perceptions, demographics, caregiver-child language interaction quality, and child language skills. It is hypothesized that dyads who receive the intervention will make greater gains in early interaction quality, knowledge of child development, and child language skills than the delayed-access control group. This work has the potential to shape early intervention design and implementation for people in underserved communities across the country.
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.
The goal of this project is to compare the relative effectiveness of two novel treatments to improve the complex grammar knowledge 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.
Many children have developmental language disorder, which makes it difficulty to learn language, including vocabulary, and results in ongoing academic and social difficulties. Despite the fact that most words are learned in context without direct teaching, we know very little about how children with developmental language disorder learn words in context. This project will combine, for the first time, two strategies which improve contextual word learning in children with typical development, and test their effect in both typically developing children, and those with developmental language disorder. The results will provide timely information that will contribute to evidence based practice for contextual word learning in children with developmental language disorder.
This project aims to optimize a critical but understudied ingredient of language intervention provided to children with developmental language disorder (DLD) - feedback. The project will bridge a gap between previous findings in our lab of inefficient feedback processing in DLD and clinical practice by identifying the conditions under which feedback-based learning can be improved in DLD. The investigators hypothesize that the effectiveness of feedback can be significantly enhanced for children with DLD when it is tailored to their unique learning strengths. The rationale for this project is based on evidence that feedback-based learning can be improved by enhancing the dominance of an intact learning system. The project will achieve its aim by manipulating (1) the timing of the feedback (immediate vs. delayed) and (2) the level of the learner's involvement in error correction dictated by feedback (active vs. passive correction). Aim 1 will determine the effect of manipulating feedback timing on learning in 140 school-age children (8-12 years) with DLD. While immediate feedback is processed by the striatum, which is also implicated in implicit learning, delaying the feedback by a few seconds shifts feedback processing to the mediate temporal lobe (MTL)-based declarative learning system. Evidence that delaying feedback improves learning in DLD would support the hypothesis of the implicit deficit theory that intervention should capitalize on declarative learning mechanisms. The project will test a novel alternative feedback-learning parity hypothesis whereby feedback-based learning is optimized when the timing of the feedback is aligned with the dominant learning system at a given time (i.e., immediate feedback during striatal-based probabilistic learning; delayed feedback during MTL-based declarative learning). Within the same group of children, Aim 2 will compare feedback-based learning in children with DLD when feedback (a) prompts active self-correction or (b) passively exposes learners to error corrections (corrective recast). Children will engage in two nonword-object paired-associate learning tasks. In one task, feedback will promote active self-correction, which is in line with declarative learning. In the other task, feedback will passively expose the learner to corrective feedback in a manner consistent with teaching approaches aiming at reducing awareness of errors. The project will determine whether children with DLD learn better when feedback prompts self-correction or when they are exposed to passive corrections. Electrophysiological measures will indicate whether passive corrections (corrective recast) are processed as negative feedback by children with DLD. For both aims, behavioral indicators of response to feedback will be complemented by electrophysiological measures of feedback processing that can determine the involvement of the striatum and MTL brain systems during the learning process. This work is scientifically and clinically significant because elucidating what manipulations optimize feedback-based learning will enhance our understanding of the impaired learning mechanism in DLD and will provide clinical guidance on what type of feedback to use during an intervention.
School age children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have known semantic learning deficits but what is less well understood is why semantic learning is difficult for these children. This project will combine behavioral and brain methods to investigate the cognitive and linguistic processes underlying semantic learning in children with DLD compared to typically developing peers. The outcomes will have implications for semantic learning intervention approaches in DLD.
The study will consist of two main elements: the enrollment of 72 children aged 6-11 years with ASD and low language competency to receive a thrice-weekly one hour language intervention for 12 weeks; and, beginning at the same time, subjects will be equally randomized to receive either aripiprazole (Abilify) (flexibly dosed from 2-10 mg per day) or placebo for 12 weeks.
This project examines how seizures, and abnormal brain activity, affect language skill in children with Benign Childhood Epilepsy with Centro-Temporal Spikes (BECTS). BECTS is a common type of childhood epilepsy, and while BECTS patients stop having seizures by their late teenage years, many studies have shown that these children have language problems that may lead to academic and social difficulties. Using standardized language testing, monitoring of brain activity, and MRI brain imaging, this project aims to determine what particular combination of BECTS symptoms put children most at risk for language problems and whether treatment with anti-epileptic medications may be helpful.
Researchers are interested in studying if magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is practical for locating the areas of the brain associated with language in children with epilepsy. When a region of the brain is active, it uses more fuel in the form of oxygen and sugar (glucose). As the brain uses more fuel it produces more waste products, carbon dioxide and water. Blood carries fuel to the brain and waste products away from the brain. As brain activity increases blood flow to and from the area of activity increases also. Patients participating in the study will be asked to perform tasks designed to test language skills while undergoing an MRI to detect areas of the brain using oxygen and receiving blood flow.
The main goal of this intervention is to increase caregivers' use of interactive play and communication strategies to improve the child's early sentence development using telemedicine and video-based feedback.
Modified constraint-induced movement therapy (mCIMT) has been successfully used with children who have hemiplegia (weakness or paralysis on one side of the body.) mCIMT uses a removable cast during treatment and home exercise programs. It has been found that mCIMT can improve use, strength and coordination of a child's affected hand, and may also help improve speech and language skills. The goal of this project is to investigate whether combining mCIMT with speech therapy will enhance speech outcomes in children with cerebral palsy.
A critical knowledge gap is whether proactive intervention can improve speech and language outcomes in infants at known risk for communication disorders. Speech and language assessments and treatments are usually not initiated until deficits can be diagnosed, no earlier than age 2-3 years. Preventive services are not available. Children with classic galactosemia (CG) hold the keys towards investigating whether proactive services are more effective than conventional management. CG is a recessively inherited inborn error of metabolism characterized by defective conversion of galactose. Despite early detection and strict adherence to lactose-restricted diets, children with CG are at very high risk not only for motor and learning disabilities but also for severe speech sound disorder and language impairment. Delays are evident from earliest signals of communication and persist into adulthood in many cases but speech/language assessment and treatment are usually not initiated until deficits manifest. However, because CG is diagnosed via newborn screening, the known genotype-phenotype association can be leveraged to investigate the efficacy of proactive interventions during the acquisition of prespeech (2 to 12 months) and early communication skills (13 to 24 months). If this proactive intervention is more effective than standard care regarding speech and language outcomes in children with CG, this will change their clinical management from deficit-based to proactive services. It will also motivate investigating this approach in infants with other types of known risk factors, e.g., various genetic causes and very low birth weight. The Babble Boot Camp is a program for children with CG, ages 2 to 24 months. The intervention is implemented by a pediatric speech-language pathologist (SLP) via parent training. Activities and routines are designed to foster earliest signals of communication, increase coo and babble behaviors, support the emergence of first words and word combinations, and expand syntactic complexity. The SLP meets with parents online every week for 10 to 15 minutes to provide instruction, feedback, and guidance. Close monitoring of progress is achieved via regularly administered questionnaires, a monthly day-long audio recording, and the SLPs weekly progress notes. At age 24 months, the active phase of the Babble Boot Camp ends. The children receive a professional speech/language assessment at ages 2 1/2, 3 1/2, and 4 1/2 years.
The purpose of this clinical trial is to investigate the impact of AFQ056 on language learning in 3-6 year old children with Fragile X Syndrome (FXS).
The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of folinic acid in the treatment of language problems in children with autism spectrum disorder. Folinic acid, also known as leucovorin, is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to decrease side effects during cancer chemotherapy. Folinic acid may be helpful in treating language problems in children with autism spectrum disorder, but this is not known. Therefore, folinic acid is an investigational new drug for this study. Investigators will enroll a total of 134 participants across all three centers, over a 5 year period and participation will last between 12 and 24 weeks.
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of early intervention on language skills for children with hearing loss.