(from applicant?s abstract): Nearly 7% of elementary school children present difficulties learning and using language. Unfortunately, language impairments are often long lasting and may have serious social, academic, and vocational ramifications. More than 1 million children receive language intervention in the public schools each year, and many more are seen in hospitals and other clinical settings. Recently, a computerized intervention approach known as Fast ForWord has received a great deal of attention at scientific meetings and in the popular press. The creators of this program (Michael Merzenich, Paula Tallal, and their associates) claim that Fast ForWord trains children?s brains to process speech better by gradually reducing specialized acoustic modifications of speech stimuli as children improve on the games. The creators of Fast ForWord have completed a large, one-group, pretest-postest national field trial of their program. Their results suggest that children make approximately 1 standard deviation of improvement on standardized tests after a 6-week intervention period. We propose a randomized clinical study to compare the language outcomes of Fast ForWord to two other interventions (computer assisted language intervention without acoustically modified speech and individual language intervention) and to the outcomes of a general stimulation (control) condition. Each year for 3 years, 24 children will be randomly assigned to each of the four conditions at three regional sites (Austin, Texas Dallas, Texas, and Lawrence, Kansas) for a total of 54 children in each condition at the end of the study. The treatments will be administered in special summer programs. The primary research question is which intervention results in the most improvement in the composite language score from the Oral and Written Language Scales. Secondary questions include which intervention results in the greatest gains in conversational language, which intervention results in the greatest gains 3 and 6 months after training, which intervention results in the greatest improvement in auditory perception, and which intervention is the most cost effective. Our results will have theoretical and practical value. Theoretically, our study tests the temporal processing hypothesis of language impairment. Practically, our study will describe and compare the language, communication, auditory processing and academic outcomes of three interventions. Our analyses will help clinicians and administrators choose the most effective and least expensive treatment for the children they serve.
