Description) The purpose of this study is to determine whether electrophysiological measures of brain activity to speech sounds predict response to and are affected by a language intervention directed at facilitating the children's intelligibility and grammar. Fifty children with specific language impairment who have severe to profound speech intelligibility problems will be the participants. Children will be randomly assigned to either a control or an intervention group. At the pretreatment period, children's speech intelligibility, spoken grammar, and ERP to speech stimuli will be assessed. The children in the intervention group will receive sessions three times a week for six months. This project is feasible within the constraints of small grant mechanism because there is already an on-going project that is conducting the intervention and collecting the proposed measures of intelligibility and grammar. A second site is proposed to increase the sample size and enable an exchange of expertise between sites. Two waves of subject recruitment will occur to allow high quality implementation and monitoring of intervention.
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| Hymel, Kent P; Makoroff, Kathi L; Laskey, Antoinette L et al. (2007) Mechanisms, clinical presentations, injuries, and outcomes from inflicted versus noninflicted head trauma during infancy: results of a prospective, multicentered, comparative study. Pediatrics 119:922-9 |
