Clinical trial NCT06504264: The Effect of Articulatory Gestures on Early Literacy Skills in 4-year Olds
Official title: The Effect of Articulatory Gestures on Word Reading, Non-word Reading, and Phonemic Segmentation in 4-year Olds
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: RECRUITING
Phase: NA
Conditions: Early Literacy
Articulatory Gestures
Phonemic Awareness
Lead sponsor: Montclair State University
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2024-07-16
Enrollment: 9
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 48
Maximum age (years): 59
Standard ages: CHILD
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: TREATMENT

Brief summary: This study will use an experimental design to explore if articulatory gestures (with letters and phonemic awareness training) enhance early literacy skills more than general mouth awareness training (with letters and phonemic awareness training) or letter/phonemic awareness training alone.

Detailed description: Multisensory reading strategies, which recruit one or more of the five senses, are routinely used in general education classrooms as well as with children who are struggling readers. Despite their wide use in schools, little research exists to substantiate the utilizing these strategies to enhance literacy. One type of multisensory reading strategy, articulatory gestures, is of particular interest to speech-language pathologists (SLPs) as they are uniquely positioned to provide speech sound placement cues. Limitations of the few prior studies that exist have prevented the isolation of the articulatory gestures themselves as the main contributor to the gains seen in literacy. This study aims to control for factors such as motivation, engagement, and time on task to explore the specific contribution of articulation strategies during phonemic awareness training on phoneme segmentation, reading of phonemically spelled words, and nonword reading in typically developing four-year old children. Using an experimental design, participants will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions: 1) phonemic awareness training with articulatory gestures, 2) phonemic awareness training with general mouth pictures, and 3) phonemic awareness training with no mouth/articulation pictures at all. Interventions will focus on phoneme-letter correspondence and phonemic segmentation using strategies specific to each group and differences between groups will be considered for pre and posttest measures.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Knows 15 letter names
* Passes hearing screening
* Passes Fluharty-2 Language Screening
* Can segment no more than three consonant-vowel (CV), VC, or CVC words into phonemes
* Not able to read more than one word or nonword used in the posttest.

Exclusion Criteria:

* Does not know 15 letter names
* Fails hearing screening
* Fails Fluharty-2 Language Screening
* Can segment more than three consonant-vowel (CV), VC, or CVC words into phonemes
* Reads more than one word or nonword used in the posttest.

Primary outcomes:
measure: number of words correctly phonemically segmented from primary investigator created list
timeFrame: immediately after the intervention
Secondary outcomes:
measure: number of words read correctly from primary investigator created list
timeFrame: immediately after the intervention
measure: number of nonwords read correctly from primary investigator created list
timeFrame: immediately after the intervention
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Montclair
country: United States
facility: Montclair State University
state: New Jersey
Study officials:
affiliation: Montclair State University
name: Robyn Becker
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References: