Reading Together: How to Promote Children's Language Development Using Family-based Shared Book Reading

Caroline Rowland150 enrolled

Overview

The aim of this project is to determine how shared reading promotes child language development, and to use this knowledge to make it an effective language-boosting tool for children from all social and economic backgrounds.

Two interventions will be created which are intended to boost children's vocabulary and grammar abilities, and will be assessed on how they are implemented by caregivers across different socio economic groups, and how they affect children's development of these language skills. Previous research has found dialogic reading interventions to be less effective for children from low socio-economic backgrounds. This project will investigate whether a shared reading intervention, designed to require less of a behaviour change from caregivers than dialogic reading, can be used to effectively boost vocabulary and grammar development in children across the whole socio-economic spectrum.

Study Type

INTERVENTIONAL

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

QUADRUPLE

Enrollment

150

Conditions

Language Development

Interventions

Reading Together - Pausing for ReadingBEHAVIORAL

Reading Together - Dialogic ReadingBEHAVIORAL

Reading Together - Shared Reading ControlBEHAVIORAL

Eligibility

Sex: ALLMin age: 30 MonthsMax age: 36 MonthsHealthy volunteers:

Medical Language ↔ Plain English

Inclusion Criteria: * All families will be included unless they fit the exclusion criteria. Exclusion Criteria: * Children born before 37 weeks gestation (premature) * Children who weighed less than 5lb 9oz at birth (low birth weight) * Children who have had an ear infection/glue ear for longer than 3 months, 4-6 ear infections within a 6 month period or another identified hearing problem (e.g. at newborn hearing screening) * Children with an identified developmental disability (e.g. Cerebral Palsy, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Fragile X syndrome, Muscular dystrophy, Di George syndrome, Down's syndrome, Williams syndrome) * Children with a hearing or visual impairment * Children who hear another language (not English) for 1 day or more in a typical week (please note that this also excludes children of parents who do not speak English) * Children whose parents have a learning disability which puts their children at risk of language delay and excludes the parents from giving informed consent on their own and on their children's behalf.

Locations (1)

Liverpool Language Lab at the University of Liverpool

Liverpool, Merseyside, United Kingdom

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Change in baseline language skills (PLS-5)

The Preschool Language Scale Fifth Edition (PLS-5) Will be administered. This is a published standardized measure of the language knowledge of individual children. The investigators will use both the Auditory Comprehension and Expressive Communication scales to measure vocabulary and grammar knowledge. The PLS-5 standard scores are based on a mean of 100 with a standard deviation of 15. Scores between 85 and 115 are considered to be within the normal range.

Time frame: Baseline and 6 weeks

Secondary Outcomes

Change in baseline syntax comprehension (CELF Preschool-2 UK)

The Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals - Preschool 2 UK (CELF Preschool-2) will be administered. This is a published standardized measure of the language knowledge of individual children. The investigators will use the 'Sentence Structure' subtest. This will allow measurement of the children's understanding of a range of simple and complex sentence structures. A sentence is read to the child and the child chooses, from a set of pictures, which picture ''goes with'' that sentence.

Time frame: Baseline and 6 weeks

Change in baseline caregiver dialogic reading behaviour

10 minute video recordings of the dyads reading books at baseline and 6 weeks will be analysed for the number of target dialogic reading behaviours. This will allow measurement of the caregiver's dialogic reading behaviour pre- and post-intervention.

Time frame: Baseline and 6 weeks

Change in baseline caregiver pause reading behaviour

10 minute video recordings of the dyads reading books at baseline and 6 weeks will be analysed for the number of target pause reading behaviours. This will allow measurement of the caregiver's pause reading behaviour pre- and post-intervention.

Time frame: Baseline and 6 weeks

Data from ClinicalTrials.gov

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