Family ASL: Longitudinal Study of Deaf Children and Hearing Parents Who Receive Services to Support the Learning of ASL

Study Overview
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Brief Summary
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This study examines the development of American Sign Language by deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children and their parents.

Detailed Description
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After being informed about the study and potential risks, adult participants who give written informed consent and children whose parents who give written permission will be enrolled in the study. They will participate in preliminary language tasks to assess baseline performance on American Sign Language (ASL) measures. Subsequently they will have weekly sessions with an ASL Specialist to support their development of ASL, following a 6-week on/6-week off ABABABAB sequence.

Official Title
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Family ASL: Longitudinal Study of Deaf Children and Hearing Parents Who Receive Services to Support the Learning of American Sign Language (ASL)

Conditions
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Deafness, Hearing Loss

Intervention / Treatment
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* Behavioral: ASL Services


Participation Criteria
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Eligibility Criteria
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Inclusion Criteria: Children: Children ages 2;00 - 2;11 at the start of the longitudinal project Child is Deaf/ Hard-of-Hearing Participating in a program utilizing a bimodal bilingual philosophy Adults: - One adult caregiver for each child Exclusion Criteria: Children with previously-diagnosed conditions other than deafness known to affect language and cognitive development Families without access to internet (at home or other locations)

Ages Eligible for Study
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Minimum Age: 2 Years

Sexes Eligible for Study
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All

Accepts Healthy Volunteers
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No

Study Plan
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How is the study designed?
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Design Details

Primary Purpose: Treatment
Allocation: Non-Randomized
Intervention Model: Single Group Assignment
Interventional Model Description: Single Case Design - interrupted time series. Participants will receive intervention in 6-week on/off blocks. Measurements are taken in both on and off weeks. The Bayesian procedure developed by Swaminathan et al. (2014) involves fitting piece-wise linear or curvilinear trends across the phases, modeling dependencies in the observations with a suitably chosen autoregressive error scheme, and using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to obtain the posterior distributions of the model parameters and effect size measures
Masking: None (Open Label)


Arms and Interventions

| Participant Group/Arm | Intervention/Treatment |
| --- | --- |
| Experimental: ASL Services - Adult ASL Development<br>Presence (or absence, across 6-week periods) of ASL services designed to support improvement in ASL fluency | Behavioral: ASL Services<br>* ASL specialist meets with participants and provides ASL instruction<br>|
| Experimental: ASL Services - Child Language Development<br>Presence (or absence, across 6-week periods) of ASL services designed to support improvement in ASL fluency | Behavioral: ASL Services<br>* ASL specialist meets with participants and provides ASL instruction<br>|

What is the study measuring?
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Primary Outcome Measures

| Outcome Measure | Measure Description | Time Frame |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Change from Baseline in ASL Phonological Production Accuracy over 12 Months | Participants copy ASL signs produced on video; their productions are scored for phonological accuracy and reported as percent correct out of all possible phonological features. Weekly measures are taken for SCD analysis. | Baseline and 12 months | 

Secondary Outcome Measures

| Outcome Measure | Measure Description | Time Frame |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Change from Baseline in ASL Production Frequency over 12 Months | Participants engage in naturalistic play sessions which are videorecorded. Sessions are analyzed for the number of productions in ASL over a 15-minute period. Weekly measures are taken for SCD analysis. | Baseline and 12 months | 

 Terms related to the study
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Keywords Provided by Centre Hospitalier Valida
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language, sign language, language development, child language, child, preschool, parents, caregivers