Rehabilitation of Narrative Language in Children With Hearing Impairment and Developmental Language Disorder

Summary

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.

Conditions

• Hearing Impaired Children
• Developmental Language Disorder

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Narrative language intervention program

Narrative language targets improving narrative macrostructure and microstructure. The program will include 24 illustrated story sequences with a minimum of 5 sequences representing the main story elements: characters and setting; problems; internal response; actions; and consequence. Story icons will be designed to represent the main 5 elements to accompany storytelling and act as visual prompts. Each story will reflect specific content with several target vocabulary words and complex morphosyntax. Each story will be followed by comprehension questions to facilitate understanding and answering question about stories. The following procedure will be implemented with each story: Modeling, answering comprehension questions, retelling with icons and colored illustrations, retelling with icons only, and retelling without icons. This procedure is adapted from story champs intervention program

BEHAVIORAL

Conventional language intervention

Language rehabilitation targets improving semantics, syntax, pragmatics and phonology.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Alexandria University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Sara M Ibrahim, Master · Alexandria University

• Ossama A Sobhy, PhD · Alexandria University

• Riham M ElMaghraby, PhD · Alexandria University

• Nesrine H Hammouda, PhD · Alexandria University

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

DOUBLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

5 Years

Max Age

12 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2022-04-19

Primary Completion

2024-05-19

Completion

2024-05-19

Countries

• Egypt

Study Locations