Partial Word Knowledge Growth in Children With LLD

Children with language-learning disabilities (LLD) have language and reading skills that are weaker than those of typically developing children. In the school-age years, reading is a primary means of exposure to new vocabulary for typically developing children. Although these children would not be expected to master a new word through a single exposure to it in text, children show evidence of partial word knowledge growth (e.g., Wagovich & Newhoff, 2004). The purpose of this project is to characterize the partial word knowledge growth of children with LLD, in comparison to children with typical language skills. Five forms of partial word knowledge (e.g., orthographic, word discrimination, syntactic, emotional content, and general semantic domain knowledge) are being measured. The study's hypotheses are that children with LLD, like typically developing peers, will demonstrate partial word knowledge growth from exposure to unfamiliar words in text, but that they will show a different pattern of growth across the five forms of partial word knowledge being assessed.

Study Overview

• Status: Completed
• Conditions: Language Disorders

Detailed Description

The purpose of this line of research is to examine the process by which children acquire partial meanings of unfamiliar words when they encounter the words for the first time in reading.

The proposed pilot study requires 6th grade children to attend three, 1-hour sessions, 2-3 days apart. The protocol for the present study is as follows: In the first session, the parents of the children will complete a consent form and a parent questionnaire; the children will complete an assent form, similar to the consent but with simpler language. Next, one half of the children will complete two pre-tests: a checklist and a multiple choice test; the other half will complete the checklist and a distracter task. In the second session, the children will read 2 of 4 possible stories, grade-appropriate in reading level and content. After reading each story, the children will be asked to write a one-page summary of the story. In the third session the children will all complete the checklist and multiple choice measure. These measures, as post-tests, are designed to assess the types of word knowledge children accrue when they read an unfamiliar word in a story.

The purpose of the proposed pilot study, then, is to assess the adequacy of the multiple choice measure, which is newly developed, for word knowledge measurement. In addition, the study will assess whether the group who received the multiple choice measure before reading the stories performs better on the posttests than the children who received only the checklist in the pretest phase. In sum, then, the purposes of the pilot are (a) to assess the adequacy of the new multiple choice measure for detecting word knowledge, and (b) to assess the adequacy of the design, prior to conducting the large-scale experiment later.

• Study Type: Observational
• Enrollment (Actual): 81

Contacts and Locations

Study Locations

• United States
  • Missouri
    • Columbia, Missouri, United States, 65211
      • Univ. of Missouri Dept. of Communication Science & Disorders

Participation Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

• Ages Eligible for Study: 12 years to 18 years (Child, Adult)
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: Yes
• Genders Eligible for Study: All

• Sampling Method: Non-Probability Sample

Study Population

Community Sample

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

• test scores indicating language and/or reading difficulties
• reading at approximately a 6th grade level
• nonverbal cognitive screening within normal limits
• hearing screening within normal limits

Exclusion Criteria:

• history of neurological conditions such as seizure disorder or TBI
• history of emotional/behavior disorder

Study Plan

How is the study designed?

Number of groups / cohorts

3

Cohorts and Interventions

Group / Cohort
Experimental; Children with language-learning disabilities reading at approximately a 6th grade level
Age-Matched; Typical language learners each of whom is pair match to an experimental participant by age and gender.
Language-Matched; Typical language learners, each of whom is pair-matched to an experimental participant by reading comprehension skills and gender.

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Time Frame
Percent words learned for each of 5 partial word knowledge types	2 weeks

Collaborators and Investigators

• Sponsor: University of Missouri-Columbia
• Collaborators: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
• Investigators: Principal Investigator: Stacy A Wagovich, PhD, University of Missouri-Columbia

Study record dates

Study Major Dates

• Study Start: May 1, 2006
• Primary Completion (Actual): December 1, 2009
• Study Completion (Actual): December 1, 2009

Study Registration Dates

• First Submitted: October 17, 2007
• First Submitted That Met QC Criteria: October 22, 2007
• First Posted (Estimate): October 23, 2007

Study Record Updates

• Last Update Posted (Estimate): October 4, 2016
• Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria: September 30, 2016
• Last Verified: September 1, 2016

More Information

Terms related to this study

• Keywords: reading; language disorders; vocabulary; language learning disabilities
• Additional Relevant MeSH Terms: Nervous System Diseases; Neurologic Manifestations; Neurobehavioral Manifestations; Communication Disorders; Language Disorders
• Other Study ID Numbers: 1011841; 1R03DC006827-01A1 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

• Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?: NO