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Narrative Discourse Treatment Development

NCT05008419 · Status: ACTIVE_NOT_RECRUITING · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 34

Last updated 2026-01-16

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Discourse impairments are breakdowns in meaningful communication beyond the level of single sentences and have a functional impact on the lives of Veterans with TBI, disrupting return to work, communication re integration, socialization, and quality of life. The few prior attempts to treat discourse impairments have been small case studies and resulted in no change or limited gains. The proposed study evaluates the feasibility of a novel narrative discourse treatment that builds upon these prior attempts by addressing breakdowns in both story content and story organization using a theoretically-driven approach. If feasible, as demonstrated by tolerability and acceptability to participants, and later shown to be effective, the proposed discourse treatment has the potential to improve daily communication, which provides a gateway for Veterans with TBI to increase meaningful participation and improve functioning in major life domains.

Conditions

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Narrative discourse treatment

The protocol will incorporate elements from prior treatment studies that showed some promise: 1) hierarchical training, 2) variety of discourse stimuli, 3) development of skills and strategies for discourse processing, 4) structured training prompts, 5) meta-cognitive and meta-linguistic strategies, and 6) integration of learning principles. Novel treatment elements will include: 1) targeting both story content and story organization, 2) use of a discourse model to guide treatment, and 3) functional communication training. Treatment will be delivered twice a week over 8 weeks. There will be four treatment phases: education, story organization, story content, and integration of story organization and content.

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • VA Office of Research and Development

    lead FED

Principal Investigators

  • Karen Le, PhD · VA Connecticut Healthcare System West Haven Campus, West Haven, CT

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
NONE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2023-11-27
Primary Completion
2026-09-30
Completion
2026-09-30

Countries

  • United States

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT05008419 on ClinicalTrials.gov