The Effect of Articulatory Gestures on Early Literacy Skills in 4-year Olds

Montclair State University

Status: Completed

Conditions: Articulatory Gestures; Phonemic Awareness; Early Literacy

Treatments: Behavioral: phonemic segmentation

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT06504264

IRB-FY23-24-3843

Details and patient eligibility

About

This study will use an experimental design to explore if articulatory gestures (with letters and phonemic awareness training) enhance early literacy skills more than general mouth awareness training (with letters and phonemic awareness training) or letter/phonemic awareness training alone.

Full description

Multisensory reading strategies, which recruit one or more of the five senses, are routinely used in general education classrooms as well as with children who are struggling readers. Despite their wide use in schools, little research exists to substantiate the utilizing these strategies to enhance literacy. One type of multisensory reading strategy, articulatory gestures, is of particular interest to speech-language pathologists (SLPs) as they are uniquely positioned to provide speech sound placement cues. Limitations of the few prior studies that exist have prevented the isolation of the articulatory gestures themselves as the main contributor to the gains seen in literacy. This study aims to control for factors such as motivation, engagement, and time on task to explore the specific contribution of articulation strategies during phonemic awareness training on phoneme segmentation, reading of phonemically spelled words, and nonword reading in typically developing four-year old children. Using an experimental design, participants will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions: 1) phonemic awareness training with articulatory gestures, 2) phonemic awareness training with general mouth pictures, and 3) phonemic awareness training with no mouth/articulation pictures at all. Interventions will focus on phoneme-letter correspondence and phonemic segmentation using strategies specific to each group and differences between groups will be considered for pre and posttest measures.

Enrollment: 9 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 48 to 59 months old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Knows 15 letter names
• Passes hearing screening
• Passes Fluharty-2 Language Screening
• Can segment no more than three consonant-vowel (CV), VC, or CVC words into phonemes
• Not able to read more than one word or nonword used in the posttest.

Exclusion criteria

• Does not know 15 letter names
• Fails hearing screening
• Fails Fluharty-2 Language Screening
• Can segment more than three consonant-vowel (CV), VC, or CVC words into phonemes
• Reads more than one word or nonword used in the posttest.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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9 participants in 3 patient groups

LPA: Letters-phonemes-articulatory gestures

Experimental group

Description:

This group will receive training for phonemic segmentation that includes using printed letters, sounds (phonemes) while simultaneously learning the articulation placements of the letters/sounds.

Treatment:

Behavioral: phonemic segmentation

LPM: Letters-phonemes-general mouth awareness

Experimental group

Description:

This group will receive training for phonemic segmentation that includes using printed letters, sounds (phonemes) while simultaneously learning about the mouth in general.

Treatment:

Behavioral: phonemic segmentation

LP: Letters-phonemes

Experimental group

Description:

This group will receive training for phonemic segmentation that includes using printed letters and sounds (phonemes) only.

Treatment:

Behavioral: phonemic segmentation