Partial Word Knowledge Growth in Children With LLD
Condition: Language Disorders
MeSH terms: Language Disorders
Study type: Observational

Summary: 
      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.
    

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.
    

Observational model: Case-Control
Time perspective: Prospective
Sampling method: Non-Probability Sample
Study population: 
        Community Sample
      
Keywords: language disorders; language learning disabilities; vocabulary; reading