View clinical trials related to Language Disorders.
Filter by:The importance of narrative skills is evident in their role in language development and their relation to important academic skills namely reading, comprehension, and writing. Narratives are also essential for competent social skills, and children with delayed language development are usually found to have less proficient social communication skills. Research demonstrates the effects of narrative language intervention on improved narrative structure and complexity in addition to improved receptive and expressive use of syntax, morphology and general language use in children with narrative language impairment in various types of communication disorders. Given the importance of narrative language abilities in language development and due to lack of research targeting the assessment and intervention of narrative language skills of Arabic speaking children with language impairments, this study is dedicated towards the assessment of narrative language in Arabic speaking children and the development of a comprehensive intervention program targeting narrative language skills and its application on children with hearing impairment and developmental language disorder.
Aphasia is an acquired impairment of language, that commonly results from damage to language areas in the brain (typically the left side of the brain). This impairment is seen in many aspects of language, including understanding, speaking, reading and writing. It is estimated that about 2 million individuals are currently living with aphasia in the United States. Further, about 200,000 Americans acquire aphasia every year (National Aphasia Association, 2020). Aphasia poses significant impact on the affected individuals and their families. Behavioral treatments that target language deficits have been shown to enhance overall communication skills and life satisfaction among individuals with aphasia. Although there is evidence that suggests that treatment is efficacious for individuals with aphasia, the extent of improvement long-term coupled with the neural patterns among those individuals are largely unknown. The current study aims to investigate the efficacy of language-based treatment and its corresponding neural patterns.
Children with developmental language disorder (DLD; also referred to as specific language impairment) experience a significant deficit in language ability that is longstanding and harmful to the children's academic, social, and eventual economic wellbeing. Word learning is one of the principal weaknesses in these children. This project focuses on the word learning abilities of four- and five-year-old children with DLD. The goal of the project is to build on our previous work to determine whether, as we have found thus far, special benefits accrue when these children must frequently recall newly introduced words during the course of learning. In this first of a series of studies, we seek to increase the children's absolute levels of learning while maintaining the advantage that repeated retrieval holds over comparison methods of learning.
The main purpose of this study is to investigate if the internet-based computer-game Grapholearn (GL) is an effective tool for early and intensive intervention of the reading decoding skills in Swedish children with DLD, as compared to two control groups of children with DLD (I) playing a math computer game, and (II) attending usual schooling. Hypothesis: Five weeks of 20 sessions of GL will improve the accuracy of word and nonword decoding skills in children with DLD from baseline to T2 and T3. The GL intervention group will perform higher number of accuratly decoded words and nonwords than the two control groups at T2, and at T3. The second aim is to elucidate how the parents' language and reading skills, prevalence of language-related diagnoses, and socio-economic-status, and the children's self-reported self-esteem is related to their reading skills. Hypothesis 1: Children with DLD who's parents show poor language and/or reading skills will perform lower on the word/nonword decoding tests. Hypothesis 2: Children who show no significant improvement of word/nonword decoding skills will to a higher degree have parents with reading difficulties. Hypothesis 3: Parents highest level of education will not be associated with the participating childrens language and reading skills. Hypothesis 4: Results from the self-reported self-esteem will be lower than normdata from the test manual, and will not be associated with the children's language and reading skills.
First, in a recording-only self-paced reading experiment, patients with epilepsy undergoing intracranial monitoring for clinical purposes will read or listen to sentences presented to them one word at time while the investigators simultaneously record neural activity through intracranial electrodes that are implanted for clinical purposes (see subject populations). At the end of the sentence, the subjects have to indicate how they comprehended the sentence by selecting which of several pictures matches the sentence they just read. Behavioral measures that the investigators record and analyze are their response times to advance to each next word in the sentence, and which picture they chose for each sentence. These behavioral measures are compared against the neural activity simultaneously recorded as they are made. Then, in a later session, the same participants will participate in a task-related stimulation experiment. This follows the exact same design as the recording-only reading experiment, the only difference is that on some trials, at controlled moments during the sentence presentation intracranial electrical stimulation is delivered through adjacent intracranial electrode contacts. The investigators will examine the effect of this stimulation on the subjects comprehension of the sentences measured by their behavior, and on the simultaneously recorded neural activity.
Children with developmental language disorders (DLD, aka specific language impairment), a prevalent pediatric disorder, experience hallmark grammar deficits with life-long impacts on educational and occupational outcomes. While effective and early interventions can mitigate the impact of DLD, not enough is known about the neural basis of DLD in young children, yet is needed to inform the design of more individualized interventions. This project uses neuroimaging, along with behavioral methods, with the goal of better understanding the memory-language mechanisms that underlie grammar learning and impairment, while also considering their association to treatment-related changes in preschoolers with DLD.
The purpose of this study is to investigate an immersive virtual field trip (iVFT) on topic specific academic vocabulary for students with developmental language disorder (DLD). DLD is the most common childhood learning disorder with a prevalence of 7.4%(1) and occurs in the absence of a known biomedical condition (e.g., hearing loss, autism, stroke, intellectual disability). DLD affects a person's academic and social function due to difficulty with using and understanding language.(2,3) Approximately half of students with DLD have a deficit in vocabulary that persists through highschool.(4) Once children fall behind in their language and vocabulary development, it is very difficult to catch up generally resulting in a wider gap as they progress through their school years. This deficit can have cascading social, mental health, occupational and financial consequences.(5) There is preliminary evidence that a virtual reality experience such as an immersive virtual field trip (iVFT) was beneficial for facilitating vocabulary and comprehension in general education(6-8) and within targeted populations of students including second language learners(9) and those with learning differences (e.g., autism,(10) attention deficit hyperactivity,(11,12) and dyslexia(13). The term "immersive" refers to a state of heightened sensation when viewing a simulated environment that is superimposed onto a screen with embedded multisensory input (e.g., visual, auditory, proprioceptive).(14) The viewer looks through 3D goggles to block out the present environment resulting in a feeling of presence. These simulated experiences or destinations (e.g., space) are a type of VR referred to as an immersive virtual field trip (iVFT). To date, there is a lack of empirical evidence, explicitly targeting academic vocabulary growth for early grade school students with DLD. In addition, no study has reported on learning outcomes of students with DLD following a VR condition. Therefore, the primary study objective was to compare gains in academic vocabulary measures between a traditional book condition and an iVFT learning condition for young students with DLD.
In the proposed project, the investigators will conduct a multisite randomized controlled trial (RCT) to determine the efficacy of Let's Know!2, a small-group, language focused comprehension intervention, on children's lower- and higher-level language skills and comprehension skills in the short- and long-term (Specific Aims 1 and 2). The investigators will also explore whether intervention effects are moderated by dosage, initial language skill, developmental language disorder (DLD) status, word reading skill, nonverbal IQ, and family socioeconomic status (Specific Aim 3). Children who have low language skills and are thus at risk for reading comprehension difficulties will participate in the study. Children will be randomly assigned to receive Let's Know! in small groups at their respective schools or to a business-as-usual control condition. The investigators will measure children's language and comprehension skills at the beginning and end of Grade 1 as well as in Grade 2 and Grade 3. The investigators hypothesize that children who experience Let's Know! will end Grade 1 with higher language skills than children in the control condition and that this will translate into better listening and reading comprehension skills as these children matriculate through elementary school.
Patients with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have communicational difficulties to adapt their language to context and to interlocutors. These difficulties have long term impacts on education and social life of these patients. Speech language therapists (SLT) helps child and teenagers with pragmatic and communicational disorders. Nevertheless, few research evaluated the efficacy of such interventions. In the present research, the students will do a literature review to identify efficacy intervention's strategies of pragmatic disorders. Then, 2 to 5 patients, aged from 8 to 14 years old, with ASD or DLD and pragmatic disorders, and who haven't intellectual disorder will be recruited. They will come to the faculty of psychology of UCLouvain before the beginning of the intervention. In this pretest session, parents will answer questionnaires et children will have tests in order to evaluate their pragmatic abilities (during 30 minutes), like conversations, role plays, communication referential tasks, etc. This evaluation will be video recorded to code pragmatic abilities. Then, a group intervention of ten sessions will be proposed (1 session per week, 10 weeks). Activities will include role plays, conversations, etc. At the end of the intervention period, a post test session, like the pretest session, will be proposed to evaluate intervention efficacy. The design is multiple study cases. This is the best design to control efficacy of these kind of interventions considering the inter-individual variability of DLD and ASD patients. This study is original since few research evaluated the efficiency of pragmatic intervention. Some studies demonstrated the efficacy of pragmatic intervention in DLD and ASD patients but theses researches were conducted in English-speaking countries. Furthermore, the present research will propose a group intervention, which weren't proposed in the literature to our knowledge (individual intervention). If the group intervention is efficacy, the cost-benefice ratio would be interested.
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) affects approximately seven percent of the population and is characterized by grammatical deficits that cascade into lifelong academic challenges and under-employment. Current treatments for DLD produce good outcomes under ideal, high intensity conditions or when parents have been trained to deliver therapy using intense coaching methods; however, current publicly funded service delivery systems and private-pay reimbursement models do not support treatment being delivered in this ideal fashion for children older than three. This project will examine alternative methods of delivering treatment that may be more feasible under typical conditions and will identify implementation barriers, with the goal of improving long-term outcomes for children with DLD. We hypothesize that feasibility and palatability will influence dose, which will in turn affect the overall language outcomes.