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Emergent Bilinguals: Child Language Proficiency and Language of Treatment

Emergent Bilinguals: the Relationship Between Child Language Proficiency and Language of Treatment on the Outcomes Children with Developmental Language Disorder

Who can join

Ages 4 to 6 · All sexes · Healthy volunteers welcome

Inclusion Criteria:

1. parent concerns and/or a history of receiving services in the public schools
2. age-specific cutoffs for the morphosyntax subtests for their best language (English or Spanish) on the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment. The cut-off score for best language for 4-year-olds is 84, for 5-year-olds is 85, and for 6-year-olds is 81.

   Using the best-language approach, these scores have a sensitivity over 90% and specificity over 80% for children between 4;0 and 6;11 years of age , which is considered acceptable for studies of diagnostic accuracy.
3. nonverbal IQ, as measured by the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test-2, matrices subtest, will be at or above a standard score of 70.
4. pass a hearing screening test
5. participants must be emergent bilingual, that is children must be producing at least simple sentences in spontaneous speech in either Spanish or English and be exposed to both langauges
6. participants must be able to benefit from treatment for both conditional adverbial clauses and complement clauses, as evidenced by accuracy below 40% on 10-item elicited production probes in both languages

Exclusion Criteria:

1\) children with significant sensory-motor concerns or psychiatric disorders per parent report will not be enrolled.

About the study

Of the 12 million children in the USA growing up bilingual, about 1 million experience Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), a disorder in language learning and use. Currently there is no guidance for speech language pathologists (SLPs) as to the language of intervention for emergent Spanish-English bilingual children with DLD. This project will examine the relationship between language proficiency and the language of intervention, considering monolingual intervention (Spanish or English) and interleaved Spanish-English intervention with the goal of improving language outcomes and thereby strengthening long-term academic achievement

What is being tested

• Sentence recast (behavioral)

Sponsor: University of Houston · Participants: 40 · Started: Nov 11, 2024

Contact the study team

Official record on ClinicalTrials.gov — NCT06866223

Locations in the U.S.

Conditions

• Speech and Language Problems in Children

From ClinicalTrials.gov, data retrieved Sep 30, 2026. Each study sets its own eligibility; the study team decides who can join.