Building Complex Building Complex Sentences ProjectSentences Project

Nicole M. KoonceUniversity of Illinois at ChicagoSummer 2009 Research InternshipSPED 595

We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or explore.-Gilcrist-

Rush University Medical CenterRush University Medical Center

Joint Project with Governors State University

Co-Investigators Cheryl M. Scott, PhD

Rush University Medical CenterDepartment of Communication Disorders & SciencesAreas of expertise: Spoken/written syntax; language sample

analysis; markers of language disorders in school-age children

Cathy Balthazar, PhDGovernors State University Department of Communication DisordersAreas of expertise: School-age language disorders; syntactic

intervention; single-subject experimental designs in clinical research

The Case for the Sentence in Language The Case for the Sentence in Language Intervention: BackgroundIntervention: Background

The sentence is at the core of written and spoken talk in the classroom

Complex sentence structures pervade the academic curriculum

Children with reading comprehension deficits have also been found to have difficulty with oral sentence level syntactic tasks (Scott, 2009)

Children receiving explicit instruction in complex sentence comprehension and production make improvements in oral and written tasks (Hirschman, 2000; Levy & Friedmann, 2009; Scott & Balthazar, 2009)

Building Complex SentencesBuilding Complex SentencesResearch QuestionsResearch Questions

1. With explicit instruction, do children with language impairment improve their ability to comprehend and produce complex sentences?

2. Is improvement comparable across sentence types?

3. Is improvement seen across spoken and written formats?

4. Is improvement reflected in both naturalistic and norm-referenced pre/post measures?

(Scott & Balthazar, 2009)

Building Complex Sentences: Methods

Phase I: Exploratory study to test intervention materials and methods of measuring change in target behaviors

Experimental Design Single-subject multiple baseline across behaviors

employed Adverbial clauses Relative clauses Object complements

Measurement of treatment effectiveness Pre- & post-treatment measures (e.g., CELF-4, CASL,

TROG-2, GORT) Periodic probes of complex sentence types

Methods cont.

Participants Three participants aged 12;9 to 15;11 Met criteria for specific language impairment Current IEP with goals in the area(s) of reading,

writing, speaking and/or listening

Interventions administered by public school speech-language pathologist currently providing services to each participant

Intervention

Adverbial, relative, and object complement clauses targeted for 6 sessions each

Session activities: Identification/awareness/exposure phase:

repeated intro of target sentence types Decontextualized (meta) phase: explicit instruction

of structure Contextualized phase: discourse level

comprehension and production tasks

Selected Results

Increased fluency with complex sentence structures

Large gains in relative clauses

Decrease in use of early developing clausal structures 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Pre 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 Post

Adverbial Clause Object Complement Relative Clause

Pre- and Post-treatment Measures

ID Pre Post Pre Post Pre Post Pre Post Pre Post Pre Post Pre Post Pre Post Pre Post

P1 72 85 90 81 82 91 7 5 10.25 11.61 1.83 2.16 2 4 7 9 67 79

P2 81 84 102 111 100 116 8 10 9.14 11.85 1.28 2.00 2 1 6 6 64 61

Written Story

Clause

Density

GORT4

Fluency

(CI 90% = 2)

GORT4

Comprehension

(CI 90% = 2)

GORT4 Oral

Rdg Quotient

(CI 90% = 6)

CELF4 Core

(CI 90% = 6)

TROG2

(Mean = 100,

SD = 15)

CASL Sentence Comp

(CI 90% = 12)

TOWL3 Sent

Combining

(SEM = 1)

Written

Story MLTU

Probes

Internship GoalsInternship Goals

1. To perform a qualitative analysis of pre- and post-treatment measures

2. To assist in developing additional pre- and post treatment measures for Phase II

3. To provide critique of intervention materials and training protocol for Phase II

4. To gain an understanding of the grant proposal development process

Goal 1: Qualitative Analysis of Pre-/Post-Goal 1: Qualitative Analysis of Pre-/Post-Treatment MeasuresTreatment Measures

Activities performed: Microanalysis of pre- and post-test results of 2

receptive and 3 expressive language tests Measured changes in complex sentence

comprehension and production for P1 and P2

Outcome: Matrix of item by item analysis detailing results for

each test and by sentence type across tests Two tests dropped from protocol and plans made to

develop criterion-referenced measures

Goal 2: Developing Additional Pre-/Post-Goal 2: Developing Additional Pre-/Post-Treatment MeasuresTreatment Measures

Activities performed: Researched video stimuli for oral discourse sample;

analyzed by content, visual presentation, vocabulary, complex sentence types, and expository structure

Develop stimuli for a paraphrase task

Outcome: Learned about copyright law with respect to use of

educational videos in research Presented results of video stimuli search to co-

investigators Gathered several samples for the paraphrase task

Goal 3: Critique Intervention ProtocolGoal 3: Critique Intervention Protocol

Activities performed: Reviewed clinician instructions and training materials Reviewed 16 session modules

Outcome: Presented feedback to co-investigators Developing a scoring rubric for collecting session data

(in progress)

Goal 4: Grant Proposal DevelopmentGoal 4: Grant Proposal Development

Activities performed: Read grant submitted by the project to American

Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation Read background info on R15 and R21 grants from

National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)

Attended planning meetings and sat in on conference call with NIDCD R15 Coordinator

Outcome: Learned differences between R15, R21, and ARRA

grants

What I…

Gave A clinician’s perspective

on implementation of intervention components

Recent knowledge of the school curricula and language demands

Genuine concern and appreciation for the role of language in the academic experience of children

Gained Insight into the research

process An understanding of the

time and resources necessary to design an intervention study

Knowledge about language sample analysis techniques

Critical skills in identifying and developing protocol stimuli and measures

ReferencesReferences

Hirschman, M. (2000). Language repair via metalinguistic means. International Journal of Communication Disorders, 35, 251-268.

Levy, H., & Friedmann, N. (2009). Treatment of syntactic movement in syntactic SLI: A case study. First Language, 29, 15-50.

Scott, C.M. (2009). A case for the sentence in reading comprehension. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 40, 184-191.

Scott, C.M., & Balthazar, C.H. (2009, June). Building complex sentences: An intervention feasibility study for school-age children with oral and written language disorders. Poster presented at the Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders, Madison, Wisconsin.

Scott, C.M., & Balthazar, C.H. (2008, November). Building sentence complexity: Evidence-based approaches with school-age children. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Chicago, IL.