University of Kansas School of Health Professions

Current Projects

Information for Parents and Potential Participants

Parent Letter and Criteria for Participants in our latest study on grammar learning in children with language impairments.

For project questions or participant inquiries, please contact Dr. Fey:
mfey@kumc.edu
(913) 588-5937
(913) 588-7963 TDD

Related Info

Intercampus Program in Communicative Disorders (KU Lawrence Campus)

Director Bio:
Marc E. Fey, PhD

Current Project 1
Input Sources of Grammatical Deficits in Specific Language Impairment (April, 2009 – July 2014, sponsored by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, R01 DC009574)

Current Project 2
Effects of Intensity of Early Communication Intervention (August, 2005 – July 2011, sponsored by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, R01 DC007660)

Past Project 1
Effects of Fast ForWord on Language Processing (September, 2005 – March 2008 , sponsored by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, R21 DC007214)

Current Project 1

Investigators:
Marc E. Fey, Ph.D., University of Kansas Medical Center
Laurence B. Leonard, Purdue University

Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) show serious limitations in grammatical ability. These limitations are often longstanding, and they represent one of the most reliable indicators of this disorder. An especially common symptom of this grammatical weakness is the inconsistent use of brief, grammatical word endings and words that mark tense and agreement (e.g., -s in jumps and is in The girl is eating). Although the details of this inconsistent use have been well described in the scientific literature, an explanation for the protracted period of inconsistency has not yet emerged. The goal of this project is to test a new proposal regarding the possible source of the inconsistent use of tense and agreement morphemes by children with SLI.

In Experiments 1-5. we will test the hypothesis that children with SLI omit tense and agreement forms because of what they experience in the environment. First, in English input to children, there is a rich supply of fully grammatical sentences that contain subject-verb sequences with no tense and agreement morphology (Take, for example, the girl go in the question Did the girl go? or the boy running in the sentence I see the boy running). Second, children with SLI have difficulty processing the complex grammar in these examples. As a result, they treat the tenseless sequences at the ends of these sentences (e.g., The girl go; The boy running) as if they are grammatical, and they use them in their own speech.

Experiment 6 is an intervention study designed to determine whether the period of inconsistency with tense and agreement morphology can be significantly reduced by manipulating the language input the children receive. Specifically, it is predicted that inconsistency can be reduced by exposing the children to many sentences containing the target morphemes (e.g., The girl jumps, The boy is walking) and minimizing exposures of questions (e.g., Did the girl go?)and complex sentences (e.g., I see the boy running)that contain subject-verb sequences with no tense and agreement morphology. The findings of this project should contribute to a greater understanding of the sources of grammatical limitations in children with SLI and provide important information concerning how best to treat the pervasive tense and agreement weaknesses seen in this disorder.

Current Project 2

Effects of Intensity of Early Communication Intervention (August, 2005 – July 2011 , sponsored by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders)

Investigators:
Steven F. Warren, Ph.D.
Director, Schiefelbusch Life Span Institute, KU-Lawrence

Marc E. Fey, Ph.D.
Professor, Hearing and Speech Department, KUMC-Kansas City

Paul J. Yoder, Ph.D.
Professor, Special Education, Vanderbilt University, Nashville

Over the past decade, members of our research group have developed an early communication intervention we refer to as Prelinguistic Communication Intervention (PCI). PCI involves direct intervention with 2-year-old children with developmental delay as well as parent training designed to establish and support a highly responsive style of parent-child interaction. Our preliminary research using experimental designs has involved a very small “dose” of direct intervention with the child, averaging approximately one hour per week for 6 months. The effects we have observed have been encouraging, but modest.

This research project is a test of the hypothesis that a high “dose” of PCI will have dramatically more positive outcomes. PCI will be delivered at two different levels of intensity to approximately 80 young children with communication delays. These children are randomly assigned to either a “high” or “low” intensity group. Children in the low-intensity group receive one hour of direct intervention per week for 9 months, while children assigned to the high-intensity group receive 5 hours a week of direct intervention for 9 months. Parents in both groups receive the same treatment focusing on helping them to be highly responsive to their children’s communication attempts. All participants in both groups are followed for an additional 6 months after the conclusion of the 9-month treatment period. We will compare the effects of high and low doses of PCI on children’s nonverbal and verbal communication skills.

Past Project 1

Effects of Fast ForWord on Language Processing (September, 2005 – August 2007, sponsored by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders)

Investigators:
Marc E. Fey, Ph.D.
Professor, Hearing and Speech Department, KUMC-Kansas Cit

Jeffrey D. Lewine, Ph.D.,

Byron J. Gajewski, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Biostatistics, KUMC-Kansas City

Mihai Popescu, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Hoglund Brain Imaging Center

Although children with primary language impairment (SLI) perform in the average range on tests of nonverbal intelligence, they have significant problems in the development of semantic, grammatical, and/or narrative language skills. Until recently, most interventions have been based on the principle that more efficient learning depends on changing the language the child hears. In some cases, new skills are taught explicitly. In contrast, Fast ForWord Language (FFW-L) is designed to improve the learner’s ability to process auditory and auditory-verbal signals by fundamentally reorganizing the child’s central auditory nervous system. These studies were designed to see if a preliminary experience with FFW-L would boost children's responses to conventional language intervention.
Twenty-three 6- to 8-year-old children with primary language impairment were assigned at random to receive FFW-L followed by NBLI, NBLI followed by FFW-L, or a no-treatment wait period followed by NBLI. We hypothesized that, if FFW-L has its advertised effects, the children receiving the FFW-L/NBLI should be at a distinct advantage at the final post-treatment testing.

After the first 5-week study period, the combined intervention groups (i.e., FFW-L/NBLI and NBLI/FFW-L), significantly outperformed the no-treatment wait/NBLI group on 2 narrative measures. At the final test period, all three groups displayed significant time-related effects on measures of narrative ability, but there were no statistically significant between-groups effects of intervention sequence. In sum, we found no evidence to support the claim that FFW-L enhances children's response to a conventional language intervention.

In a related study, a subset of these children were successfully tested before and after 5 weeks of NBLI on a task requiring them to listen to sentences ending with incongruous or congruous words (e.g., To keep his pants up, Dad always wears a …belt/clock.) Before treatment, these children showed no evidence of the classic N400 brain response to this type of stimulus. After NBLI, this small group showed N400 responses that were reliably larger for the incongruous than the congruous stimuli. In other words, the therapy appeared to normalize the physiologic response to the auditorily-presented sentence stimuli. These results may be evidence of a positive neurophysiologic effect of conventional language intervention on the lexical-semantic processing of children with language impairment.