Building Complex Sentences Project Nicole M. Koonce University of Illinois at Chicago Summer 2009 Research Internship SPED 595 We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or explore. -Gilcrist-

Rush University Medical Center Rush University Medical Center Joint Project with Governors State University Co-Investigators Cheryl M. Scott, PhD Rush University Medical Center Department of Communication Disorders & Sciences Areas of expertise: Spoken/written syntax; language sample analysis; markers of language disorders in school-age children Cathy Balthazar, PhD Governors State University Department of Communication Disorders Areas of expertise: School-age language disorders; syntactic intervention; single-subject experimental designs in clinical research

The Case for the Sentence in Language Intervention: 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 Sentences Research 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 Pre- and Post-treatment Measures Probes

Internship 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- Treatment 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- Treatment 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 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 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

References Hirschman, M. (2000). Language repair via metalinguistic means. International Journal of Communication Disorders, 35, Levy, H., & Friedmann, N. (2009). Treatment of syntactic movement in syntactic SLI: A case study. First Language, 29, Scott, C.M. (2009). A case for the sentence in reading comprehension. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 40, 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.