Recruiting

Child Language ProficiencyEmergent Bilinguals: Child Language Proficiency and Language of Treatment

Sponsor:

University of Houston

Code:

NCT06866223

Conditions

Developmental Language Disorder

Language Impairment

Eligibility Criteria

Sex: All

Age: 4 - 6

Healthy Volunteers: Accepted

Interventions

Sentence recast

Study Details

Brief 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 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

Conditions

Developmental Language Disorder

Language Impairment

Study ID

NCT06866223

Start date

Nov 11, 2024

Status verified date

Mar, 2025

Completion date

Jul 1, 2028

Anticipated

Primary completion date

Dec 1, 2027

Anticipated

Eligibility Criteria

Sex: All

Age: 4 - 6

Healthy Volunteers: Accepted

Inclusion Criteria:

1. parent concerns and/or a history of receiving services in the public schools
2. 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.
3. nonverbal IQ, as measured by the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test-2, matrices subtest, will be at or above a standard score of 70.
4. pass a hearing screening test
5. participants must be emergent bilingual, that is children must be producing at least simple sentences in spontaneous speech in either Spanish or English and be exposed to both langauges
6. 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 Criteria:

1) children with significant sensory-motor concerns or psychiatric disorders per parent report will not be enrolled.

Study Design

Enrollment

40 participants

Anticipated

Allocation

Randomized

Intervention Model

Crossover

Primary purpose

Treatment

Interventions and Outcome Measures

Arms

experimental: Monolingual therapy

experimental: Interleaved therapy

A trained, bilingual SLP will treat the targeted structure at a rate of \~ 1 recast per minute, for 16 hours spread over 9 weeks to obtain a planned dose of 912-1008 recasts (960 +/- 5%). Following evidence on enhanced conversational recasting, the SLP will obtain the child's attention before recasting and systematically vary the lexical items in the recasts. Children will receive therapy in the dominant language (Spanish or English) and will also be offered the opportunity to use the non-dominant language (Spanish or English) via communication bid in the child's non-dominant language every 3-5 minutes and continue in that language as long as the child responds. If the child does not respond or responds in their dominant language, the examiner will switch to the other language.

Interventions

Sentence recast

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

Primary outcome measure

Accuracy on elicited production probes (conditional or nominal) [ Time Frame: ~1 month before (Pre), 2 weeks before second structure (Mid) and 2 weeks after treatment (Post test)] ]

Central Contacts and Locations

Locations

University of Houston

Recruiting

Houston, Texas, United States, 77204

Contacts

Anny Castilla-Earls, PhD

713-7430488 annycastilla@uh.edu

More Information

Sponsor

University of Houston

Last update posted

Mar 10, 2025

Last verified

Mar, 2025

Trial information was received from ClinicalTrials.gov and was last updated on 2026-09-09. This information was provided to ClinicalTrials.gov by University of Houston on 2025-03-10.