Deafness, Hearing Loss
Conditions
Keywords
language, sign language, language development, child language, child, preschool, parents, caregivers
Brief summary
This study examines the development of American Sign Language by deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children and their parents.
Detailed description
After being informed about the study and potential risks, adult participants who give written informed consent and children whose parents who give written permission will be enrolled in the study. They will participate in preliminary language tasks to assess baseline performance on American Sign Language (ASL) measures. Subsequently they will have weekly sessions with an ASL Specialist to support their development of ASL, following a 6-week on/6-week off ABABABAB sequence.
Interventions
BEHAVIORALASL Services
ASL specialist meets with participants and provides ASL instruction
Sponsors
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
University of Connecticut
Study design
Allocation
NON_RANDOMIZED
Intervention model
SINGLE_GROUP
Primary purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
NONE
Intervention model description
Single Case Design - interrupted time series. Participants will receive intervention in 6-week on/off blocks. Measurements are taken in both on and off weeks. The Bayesian procedure developed by Swaminathan et al. (2014) involves fitting piece-wise linear or curvilinear trends across the phases, modeling dependencies in the observations with a suitably chosen autoregressive error scheme, and using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to obtain the posterior distributions of the model parameters and effect size measures
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
ALL
Age
2 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
No
Inclusion criteria
Children: * Children ages 2;00 - 2;11 at the start of the longitudinal project * Child is Deaf/ Hard-of-Hearing * Participating in a program utilizing a bimodal bilingual philosophy Adults: \- One adult caregiver for each child
Exclusion criteria
* Children with previously-diagnosed conditions other than deafness known to affect language and cognitive development * Families without access to internet (at home or other locations)
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Change from Baseline in ASL Phonological Production Accuracy over 12 Months | Baseline and 12 months | Participants copy ASL signs produced on video; their productions are scored for phonological accuracy and reported as percent correct out of all possible phonological features. Weekly measures are taken for SCD analysis. |
Secondary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Change from Baseline in ASL Production Frequency over 12 Months | Baseline and 12 months | Participants engage in naturalistic play sessions which are videorecorded. Sessions are analyzed for the number of productions in ASL over a 15-minute period. Weekly measures are taken for SCD analysis. |
Countries
United States
Outcome results
None listed