Syntactic Intervention for Cantonese-speaking Children With DLD

Summary

The goal of this clinical trial is to compare the efficacy of explicit vs. implicit intervention on subject relative clause production in Cantonese-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). It will also learn about individual difference predictors of intervention outcomes. The main questions it aims to answer are:

1. Will the explicit intervention (Shape Coding+syntactic priming) on relative clause production lead to better outcomes than implicit intervention (syntactic priming only)?
2. Can pre-intervention procedural learning, working memory (WM) capacities, and grammar impairment severity predict the intervention outcomes across children with DLD?
3. Will 10 intervention sessions (500 doses of the target structure) lead to learning progress in children with DLD, even with implicit intervention, and will the progress plateau at some point of the intervention?

Researchers will compare the explicit intervention to the implicit intervention to see if the explicit intervention leads to better interventional outcomes.

Participants will:

* Undergo diagnostic assessments of DLD to confirm their DLD status.
* Complete pre-intervention assessments to assess their procedural learning and working memory capacities.
* Undergo the intervention phase, which consists of a pretest, 10 intervention sessions, three posttests (after the 1st, 5th and 10th intervention), and a retention test (1 month after the last intervention).

Conditions

• Developmental Language Disorder

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Explicit intervention (Shape Coding+syntactic priming)

For explicit intervention, a syntactic priming task will be preceded by explicit teaching of the target structure using the Shape Coding scheme adapted to be age- and language (Cantonese)-appropriate. A different set of 10 sentences will be used for teaching in each explicit intervention session, with five sentences used as exemplars for the experimenter to explain the target structure, and the remaining five sentences for children to practice. The syntactic priming session will be presented as a game to sustain the children's interest and to disguise the purpose of the study. Each intervention session will contain 40 pairs of prime-target pictures, 40 pairs of control-target pictures, and 20 pairs of filler pictures, randomly presented to the experimenter and child and controlled by the experimenter. In total, there are 500 doses of SRC-O sentences (50 sentences x10 sessions).

BEHAVIORAL

Implicit intervention (syntactic priming only)

For implicit intervention, the same 10 sessions of syntactic priming will be provided to the children without explicit instruction of the SRC-O structure using the Shape Coding System. Nonetheless, to make the exposure and dosage as comparable as possible between the two groups, children in the implicit intervention group will also receive 10 listening sessions before the syntactic priming sessions. During the listening sessions, the same sets of sentences used in the explicit instruction sessions will be presented and the children will be instructed to listen closely as the tutor reads aloud the SRC-O sentence. Each listening session will be followed by a syntactic priming session that is identical to that of the explicit intervention group. In total, there are also 500 doses of SRC-O sentences (50 sentences x10 sessions).

Sponsors & Collaborators

• The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Caicai Zhang, PhD · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

5 Years

Max Age

8 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2024-02-10

Primary Completion

2026-05-31

Completion

2026-05-31

Countries

• Hong Kong

Study Locations