Emergent Bilinguals: Child Language Proficiency and Language of Treatment

Recruiting now · Not applicable

Conditions studied: Developmental Language Disorder, Language Impairment

In brief

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

Key facts

Study ID

NCT06866223

Run by

University of Houston

People needed

40

Starts

2024-11-11

Expected to finish

2028-07-01

Last updated by the study team

2025-03-10

Who can join

Age: 4 and older, up to 6. Sex: any. Healthy volunteers: accepted.

You may qualify if…

• parent concerns and/or a history of receiving services in the public schools
• 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.
• nonverbal IQ, as measured by the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test-2, matrices subtest, will be at or above a standard score of 70.
• pass a hearing screening test
• 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
• 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

You may not qualify if…

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

Where it is running

• University of Houston — Houston, Texas, United States (enrolling)

Full record on ClinicalTrials.gov

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