Efficacy of AMALS in Treating Language Impairment in Children

Completed · Phase 2

Conditions studied: Language Disorder

In brief

The goal of this proposal is to examine the efficacy of a manualized treatment intervention, AMALS: Addressing Multiple Aspects of Language Simultaneously, which is designed to remediate semantic, morphological, and syntactic aspects of language in preschool children with language impairment. This study will target preschool children with language impairment living in a region characterized by nonmainstream dialects. Questions driving this work are: 1. Will children participating in the AMALS treatment exhibit greater semantic, morphological, and syntactic complexity on multiple outcome measures at the completion of the intervention compared to a Discrete Trial Approach (DTA) group? 2. Will these gains be maintained at one-month follow up? 3. What is the impact of dialect on dependent variables, specifically morphosyntactic abilities? To answer these questions a randomized clinical trial will be conducted comparing AMALS, an integrated approach to treatment, with DTA, an additive approach to therapy. In this study rather than restrict the ethnic and cultural backgrounds of this population, children's use of dialect will be uniquely identified and examined.

Key facts

Study ID: NCT00840060
Run by: Lamar University
People needed: 40
Starts: 2009-01-01
Expected to finish: 2010-12-01
Last updated by the study team: 2012-05-15

Who can join

Age: 4 and older, up to 6. Sex: any. Healthy volunteers: not accepted.

You may qualify if…

Demonstrate sufficient intelligibility as determined by a score of 85% on percent consonant correct (PCC) measures;
Demonstrate sufficient phonological ability to use grammatical morphemes as determined by use of word-final /s, z, t, d/ on sound- in-word subtest from the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation-2 (GFTA; Goldman \& Fristoe, 2000)
Nonverbal IQ above 70 as scored on the Columbia Mental Maturity Scale (CMMS; Burgemeister, Blum, \& Lorge, 1972);
Below 1SD on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation: Norm-referenced Test (DELV; Seymour, Roeper \& de Villiers, 2005);
Below 1.39SD on the Structured Photographic Expressive Language Test-Preschool (SPELT-P; Werner \& Kresheck, 1983);
Documentation from teachers and/or parents of impressions of language status in comparison with peers;
More than one standard deviation below the mean on both levels 3 and 4 of the Preschool Language Assessment Instrument (PLAI; Blank, Rose, \& Berlin, 1978).

You may not qualify if…

English as the primary language
No oral-motor impairment
No hearing impairment
No co-morbid psychiatric or neurological impairments

Where it is running

West Orange Cove Consolidated Independent School District — Orange, Texas, United States
Little-Cypress Mauriceville Consolidated School District — Orange, Texas, United States
Port Arthur Independent School District — Port Arthur, Texas, United States

Full record on ClinicalTrials.gov

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