$2.5M NIH Grant to Help USU Professor Boost Skills in Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Lillywhite Endowed Chair Ron Gillam is part of a collaborative research team that was recently awarded a combined $2.5M four-year grant to study listening therapy for school children with developmental language disorder.

The team of speech pathologists will provide listening therapy that aims to improve the sentence comprehension abilities of elementary and middle-school children who have difficulty understanding spoken language. The grant is funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The other researchers on the project are speech pathologists at Ohio University and the University of Arizona.

“Students with developmental language disorder struggle every day to understand the words and sentences they encounter in school,” says Teresa Ukrainetz, assistant department head of Department of Communication Disorders and Deaf Education at Utah State University.

Educators know how to teach the vocabulary of science and literature and how to motivate students to learn about these ideas, Ukrainetz said, but they are puzzled when it comes to teaching students how to understand the complicated sentences that carry those ideas.

“This large-scale, rigorous scientific study has the potential to fill that missing puzzle piece and make a fundamental difference in the educational success of many children with language-learning difficulties,” Ukrainetz said.

Developmental language disorder, or DLD, affects about 8% of children in the United States.

“These children have difficulty learning and using language, but they don’t have a hearing impairment or intellectual disabilities,” Gillam said. “The language therapy they get is helpful to them to the extent that they no longer require special help, but about 50% have lifelong difficulties.

Beginning as toddlers, children with language impairment often need additional support.

“When language-impaired kids are little and just learning the language, they need ten times more repetition than an average child does — even when they’re learning a word.” Gillam said. “A normally developing kid will hear a word one or two times and learn it.”

While similar research has been done on preschool-age children, this is the first study that focuses on the academic challenges of DLD children between the ages of 8 and 11.

Because they’re at the age where they’re falling farther and farther behind their peers academically, it’s a critical time to provide intervention.

“The books and academic materials they’re exposed to at that age contain complex sentences that are very difficult for them to understand and to produce,” Gillam said. “These children struggle to understand, speak and write these types of sentences.”

Special education teachers and speech-language therapists already have methods to teach children with DLD to produce sentences correctly. It’s comprehension, Gillam said, that is more complicated. For this reason, the four-year, multi-site research project is focused on improving comprehension skills by providing a total of 20 therapy sessions to 8- to 11-year-olds over a 10-week period. Some 250 children will participate in the intervention study across three states—Utah, Ohio and Arizona — over the four years. Each site will collect its own data.

The researchers will compare two different instructional techniques for complex sentence construction. The first is explicit instruction, where the grammar and the rule are explained directly. The other is implicit instruction, which Gilliam said is based on a cognitive psychology principle called “priming.”

“I say a sentence and show a picture,” Gilliam said, “then I prime the construction: ‘A zebra was chased by a lion.’ Then I ask the child to tell me about the picture, but I never say the rule.”

Researchers have written papers positing that implicit instruction for complex sentence structure is better, Gilliam said, but so far there have been very few studies that show it. The studies that do exist have all been done with young children and less complex sentences.

“We need strong evidence that implicit learning is most effective, so we’re doing this with older kids and with more difficult sentence structures to make the case,” Gilliam said.

The therapy is designed to go beyond the child’s working memory, or short-term memory, which is where explicit instruction techniques are most effective. Implicit instruction, on the other hand, takes more time to learn, but the child tends to create the rule in long-term memory and therefore has a stronger, more permanent grasp of the concept.

“We know that with explicit instruction, kids learn faster, but they don’t generalize it,” Gillam said. “They’ll do it with you, but when they walk out the door and hear someone else saying it as a construction, they still struggle to understand it.”

Within USU’s Department of Communication Disorders and Deaf Education, Gillam’s colleagues are enthusiastic about the forthcoming research.

“Dr. Gillam is a preeminent scientist and scholar in the overlapping fields of communication disorders and learning disabilities,” Ukrainetz said. “He has made tremendous contributions to understanding and remediating language-learning disabilities. We are proud to have him in our department and institution, and we look forward to the outcome of another ground-breaking research project.”

The primary goal of the project is to provide an effective intervention that will help children who struggle to understand complex sentences, and Gillam is hopeful about its immediate and long-term impact on students’ academic success.

“The most important and direct benefit to a child who participates in this study is that his or her understanding of spoken sentences may improve by going through the sessions,” Gillam said. “The final benefit of this study is broad-based. If, after this study, we find that one technique works better than the other to improve children’s listening comprehension, we will be in a good position to train others to use the technique with more children. That’s what we’re hoping for.”

Gillam and his colleagues are currently recruiting participants for this study. They are seeking children between the ages of 8 and 11 who have difficulty understanding complex language that is spoken or written. The intervention lasts for 10 weeks and can be conducted in person or over Zoom at a time that is convenient for the participants and their families. Participants will receive a total of $220 ($10 per session). To learn more about the study, contact Gillam at ron.gillam@usu.edu or call 435-797-1704.