Clinical trial NCT06860022: Sentence Shaping - DHH
Official title: Sentence Shaping: Written Language Intervention for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Middle Schoolers
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: NOT_YET_RECRUITING
Phase: NA
Conditions: Hearing Loss, Bilateral
Lead sponsor: Vanderbilt University
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2025-03-05
Enrollment: 30
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 9
Maximum age (years): 15
Standard ages: CHILD
Accepts healthy volunteers: no
Allocation: NA
Intervention model: SINGLE_GROUP
Intervention model description: Single-case multiple probe across participants
Primary purpose: TREATMENT

Brief summary: The proposed research addresses a long-standing and important challenge of improving literacy skills of children who are deaf and hard of hearing, a historically under researched group. The investigators aim to leverage shape coding - an empirically validated intervention approach for constructing sentences in spoken English - for improving how efficiently children who are deaf and hard of hearing learn to correctly construct sentences in written English. To advance the promising yet underutilized research on shape coding, the investigators complete the next logical step of applying the visual supports provided with shape coding to written language for deaf and hard of hearing children. Shape coding has been effective for teaching sentence structure in spoken English to children with language disabilities and has recently been applied to sentence structure in American Sign Language with deaf and hard of hearing children. Intervention involving shape coding is predicted to result in increased accuracy of word order in sentences in written English because deaf and hard of hearing children often benefit from visual information. The investigators will accomplish this aim using single case multiple probe across participants design studies with 30 fifth through eighth grade children who are deaf and hard of hearing. The knowledge gained will guide language and literacy intervention for children who are deaf and hard of hearing.


Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Children in grades five through eight
* deaf or hard of hearing
* use spoken English and American Sign Language (ASL)
* bilateral hearing loss
* the ability to read and understand the grammatical structures of interest
* already be writing sentences, but demonstrate errors in word order and/or grammar.

Exclusion Criteria:

* diagnosis of dyslexia
* uncorrected vision impairment (i.e., identified vision loss without use of corrective lenses that interferes with eligibility evaluation tasks)
* evidence of severe motor impairment (i.e., insufficient motor skills to complete eligibility evaluation tasks independently).

Primary outcomes:
measure: Proportion of children for whom the intervention is successful
timeFrame: Baseline to up to 8 weeks maximum
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Proportion of children that generalize targeted skill to unpracticed words within targeted structure
timeFrame: Baseline to up to 8 weeks maximum
measure: Proportion of children that generalize targeted skill to unpracticed modality within targeted structure
timeFrame: Baseline to up to 8 weeks maximum.
measure: Proportion of children that maintain targeted skill after intervention has ended
timeFrame: Begins no more than 2 weeks after intervention phase ends; lasts up to 3 weeks
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Nashville
country: United States
facility: Vanderbilt University Medical Center
state: Tennessee
Study officials:
References: