Supporting Children's School Readiness.

Language Development Clinical Trial

Official title:

A Randomised Control Trial to Test the Effect of Parents' Inference-eliciting Questions During Shared Book Reading on 4-year-olds' Listening Comprehension

Clinical Trial Details — Status: Completed

Administrative data

• NCT number: NCT02854462
• Other study ID #: R/139470-11-1-INFERENCE
• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: August 10, 2016
• Est. completion date: March 22, 2018

Study information

• Verified date: May 2018
• Source: University of Sheffield
• Contact: n/a
• Is FDA regulated: No
• Study type: Interventional

Clinical Trial Summary

The aim of this project is to test whether training parents to ask their children 'inference- eliciting' questions during book reading is effective in promoting story comprehension for 4-year-olds from a range of socio-economic backgrounds.

Description:

Language comprehension relies on the ability to make local and global inferences (e.g., inferring what a pronoun refers to, or inferring why a protagonist in a story did something based on information distributed through the text). These skills develop in the preschool years and are demonstrated when children make sense of stories that are read to them. While important for later reading ability and academic success, relatively little is known about whether anything can be done to improve inference-making skills in the preschool years. One possibility is that parent-child book reading would help. During book reading, some parents naturally ask their children questions about the story that would require them to make inferences about the text. The current study is designed to test whether doing this promotes children's ability to make inferences. Half the parents in this study will be given books with inference eliciting questions added to them and will be provided with training about how to ask these questions and respond to their children's answers. The other half of the parents will be given a maths exercise book and asked to spend the same amount of time per day working through this.

Recruitment information / eligibility

• Status: Completed
• Enrollment: 100
• Est. completion date: March 22, 2018
• Est. primary completion date: March 20, 2018
• Accepts healthy volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers
• Gender: All
• Age group: 50 Months to 56 Months

Eligibility

Inclusion Criteria:

Children are:

First born Full term (i.e. born no more than 3 weeks prematurely) With birth weight over 2.5 kg Being raised as monolingual English speakers

Exclusion Criteria:

Neither caregivers nor infants have any significant known physical, mental or learning disability.

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Language Development

Intervention

Behavioral:
• Language comprehension intervention

• Counting intervention

Locations

Country	Name	City	State
United Kingdom	University of Sheffield	Sheffield	South Yorkshire

Sponsors (2)

Lead Sponsor	Collaborator
University of Sheffield	University of Leeds

Country where clinical trial is conducted

United Kingdom, 

Outcome

Type	Measure	Description	Time frame	Safety issue
Primary	Change after 4 weeks in children's ability to answer inference questions.	An age-appropriate test of inferencing ability has been developed for this study including vignettes developed by the Language and Reading Research Consortium. Children listen to short vignettes and are then asked questions that require them to make local and global inferences based on the information in the stories.	Baseline: when child is 4 years 3 months. Post test: 4 weeks post intervention
Secondary	Change in NFER baseline assessment	This is an age appropriate test of maths and language ability.	Baseline: when child is 4 years 3 months - 4 years 6 months. Post test: 4 weeks post intervention