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Emergent Bilinguals: Child Language Proficiency and Language of Treatment

University of Houston · with National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), University of Delaware · NCT06866223

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Opens the official ClinicalTrials.gov record, with the study team’s contacts. Bored Studies doesn’t enroll anyone.

Key facts

Compensation
Not posted. Ask the study team before screening.
Who can join
Ages 4–6 · All sexes
Healthy volunteers
Accepted
Study type
Interventional · Not applicable
Target enrollment
40
US sites recruiting
1
Study start
November 11, 2024
Record last updated
March 10, 2025

Status re-checked against ClinicalTrials.gov within the last 12 hours.

What the study is about

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

Being studied: Sentence recast

Conditions: Developmental Language Disorder; Language Impairment

Eligibility criteria

Copied from the official record. The study team makes the final decision at screening.

Show full criteria

Inclusion Criteria

  • 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

Exclusion Criteria

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

Recruiting US locations

  • University of Houston

    Houston, TX 77204

    Site contact: Anny Castilla-Earls, PhD · 713-7430488 · annycastilla@uh.edu

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Emergent Bilinguals: Child Language Proficiency and Language of… (NCT06866223) | Bored Studies