CLIP
COMPARISON OF LANGUAGE INTERVENTION PROGRAMS
Welcome to CLIP!This study is supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health.
More than 1 million children with language impairments receive intervention services in public schools each year (US Dept. of Education, 1998), and many more receive treatment in hospitals, rehabilitation agencies, and private clinics. Clearly, language intervention comprises a large proportion of the health and education services that are provided to children with disabilities. There are no large-scale efficacy studies of language intervention with school age children.
Recently, a novel approach to language intervention called Fast ForWordTM (Scientific Learning Corporation, 1998) has received a great deal of attention in the scientific literature and the lay press. The developers of FFW assert that the program leads to neural reorganization that causes an increased ability to perceive fast changing acoustic input (Tallal, 1996; Merzenich, 1996; Merzenich, et al., in press) which results in unusually fast language learning. These claims have led to disagreement in the scientific literature and at professional meetings, focusing debate on theories of language learning in children with language impairment and on the need for comparative efficacy studies.
This randomized clinical trial was designed to compare the effects of three language intervention programs on the language abilities of 216 children with language impairment (LI). The three clinical arms are: 1) Fast ForWordTM (FFW), which presents acoustically modified speech in its computer exercises; 2) computer-assisted language intervention (CALI), which is comprised of computer programs that do not use acoustically modified speech; and 3) individual language intervention (ILI). There will also be an Academic Enrichment arm (AE) in which children play academic computer games but do not receive direct therapy. Participants will be randomized to one of the four arms for a total of 54 children per intervention arm. All language interventions will be delivered for 1 hour and 40 minutes each day, 5 days per week for 6 weeks. Children in the Academic Enrichment arm will play computer games for the same amount of time as children in the FFW and CALI arms. Effectiveness of the treatments will be measured immediately after completion of the treatments, and again three months after treatment.
Home Contact Info Log in to CLIP