Treating Passive Structure Knowledge Deficits in School-Age Children With Developmental Language Disorder

The goal of this project is to compare the relative effectiveness of two novel treatments to improve the knowledge of the passive sentence structure of school-age (8-11-year-old) children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Treatment 1 is an implicit approach to promoting children's automatic grammar learning and Treatment 2 is a more conventional explicit approach in which participants are taught the rules underlying the grammar. Treatment 1 involves children listening to an examiner produce a target sentence 20 times during each training session while describing a picture. The children will then see a picture and be asked to describe the action taking place. Treatment 2 involves children listening to an examiner describe the action occurring in a picture using a sentence pattern targeted to the child's deficit. The child will then be asked who did the action in the sentence and who received the action, after which the examiner will provide specific feedback about why the child's response was correct or incorrect. The expectation is that over a short period children will begin to use their targeted sentence pattern after hearing the examiner produce it many times. Children will complete four outcome measures (syntactic knowledge, sentence comprehension, sentence chunking, narrative comprehension/ production) prior to treatment, immediately after treatment, and five weeks after treatment. Children will be randomly assigned to one of the two treatments. Both treatments will be delivered 20 times over 10 weeks. The investigators anticipate that the children receiving Treatment 1 will show stronger gains in knowledge across the four outcome measures.