Strategies for Teaching Verbs

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Status: Completed

Conditions: Child Language; Down Syndrome; Language Development Disorders

Treatments: Behavioral: Semantic cues (perform action), syntactic cues (sentence frame), or combined semantic and syntactic cues

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03441685

172058

Details and patient eligibility

About

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.

Enrollment: 44 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 3 to 17 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Must use oral communication as their primary means of communication
• Must be monolingual English speakers
• Behaviorally able to attend for 20 minutes
• Children with typical development must demonstrate no more than one standard deviation below the mean on the speech and language measures

Exclusion criteria

• Nonverbal cognitive score less than three standard deviations below the mean (standard score of 54 below)
• Identified hearing loss or failed hearing screening
• Uncorrected vision impairment
• Motor impairment that prevents completion of study activities
• Concomitant disorders (e.g., Autism spectrum disorder)

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: N/A

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

---

44 participants in 1 patient group

Verb strategies

Experimental group

Description:

The examiner labels each target word and performs the corresponding action six times in each condition. She elicits the target word from the participant two times per word per condition and provides feedback on accuracy each time. In the semantic cues condition, the examiner prompts the child to perform the target action twice. In the syntactic cues condition, instead of only saying the target word with the present progressive verb marker, the examiner uses two forms of complete sentences while performing the action (i.e., "I am X-ing," and "See. I X."). In the combined condition, the examiner prompts the child to perform the target action and consistently uses complete sentences.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Semantic cues (perform action), syntactic cues (sentence frame), or combined semantic and syntactic cues