NCT03419611

Word Learning in Children With Autism

Status unknown NA Last updated 29 April 2019

What this trial tests

NA trial testing Multi-Modal in Autistic Disorders Spectrum in 60 participants. Status unknown.

Timeline

1 November 2016

Primary endpoint
31 May 2021

31 May 2021

Quick facts

Lead sponsor	University of Kansas
Phase	NA
Status	Status unknown
Study type	INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation	randomized
Design	sequential
Masking	single
Primary purpose	treatment
Enrollment	60
Start date	1 November 2016
Primary completion	31 May 2021
Estimated completion	31 May 2021
Sites	1 location across United States

Drugs / interventions tested

• Multi-Modal
• Treatment as Usual
• High Intensity Multi-Modal

Conditions studied

• Autistic Disorders Spectrum — all drugs for Autistic Disorders Spectrum →

Sponsor

University of Kansas

Who can join

Adults 5 to 10, any sex, with Autistic Disorders Spectrum. Patients with the condition only — healthy volunteers not accepted.

Sponsor's own description

The project highlights one of the primary areas of research within the KIDDRC- language and communication. The focus is on language and communication in children with autism and minimal verbal skills (less than 20 spoken words). Remaining nonverbal past the age of 5 years has been considered a poor prognostic indicator for future language developments, yet few interventions have been developed to address this problem. The Specific Aims for this project are (1) to further investigate a multimodal intervention for school-age children with minimal verbal skills-defined as less than 20 words spontaneously spoken, signed, or selected via graphic symbol selection-and (2) to identify significant covariates associated with differential responding to the intervention. The research addresses an unmet need to promote spoken word production in children who remain essentially nonverbal well past the ages associated with speech acquisition. The project is also innovative because: a) it investigates a multimodal intervention based on principles of phonotactic probability and neighborhood density in combination with augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), and b) it investigates novel predictors of treatment response that are obtained through cutting-edge technologies. This intervention will have better success than past interventions because the intervention will provide increased input through speech, digitized speech and visual images and additional speech sound practice for words that are comprised of high frequency sounds in the child's repertoire. Extant speech sounds in each participant's repertoire will be identified using LENA™ digitized recordings. Vocabulary words will then be selected based on a child's speech sound repertoire and principles of word learning-words with high probability speech sound sequences will be selected and taught with either multimodal intervention or a treatment as usual condition. Responses to these interventions will be evaluated using a Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trials (SMART) design. Different outcomes may be associated with individual and environmental predictors identified in our previous research. Individual predictors include verbal comprehension, imitation skills, adaptive behavior, nonverbal speech sound repertoire, and communication complexity. Communication complexity will be measured with the Communication Complexity Scale (CCS), developed by the Principal Investigator. Environmental predictors include language input to the child as measured with LENA™ recording devices. Results will determine if the multimodal intervention is more successful than treatment as usual for teaching word productions.

Publications & conference data

No peer-reviewed publications indexed yet for this trial.