More and Less Social Comprehension

Официальное название

More and Less Social Comprehension: Child and Text Factors for Autistic Children

Обзор

The goal of this early Phase 1 clinical trial is to assess if the social content of a story impacts autistic children's listening comprehension of stories. The main questions this study aims to answer are: * Does removing social content from a story improve listening comprehension in autistic children? * Does listening comprehension of more social versus less social stories differentially predict performance on a standardized reading comprehension measure? Participants will listen to more social and less social stories while viewing accompanying pictures and answer comprehension questions about the stories and complete a standardized assessment of reading comprehension. In addition, participants complete measures of their nonverbal cognition, hearing status, autism severity, language abilities, and social communication abilities to help characterize individual differences in participants.

Подробное описание

Listening comprehension is an important predictor of later reading comprehension, academic success, health, psychosocial, and vocational outcomes; yet roughly 65% of autistic school-age children have poor comprehension. Non-autistic comprehension of more social (e.g., narrative) texts is better than less social (e.g., expository texts) because non-autistic individuals can bootstrap their real-world social understanding to better understand the text. In contrast, autistic comprehension of less social texts has been shown in a small pilot study to be better than more social texts, which is likely due to their social communication impairments. The Construction-Integration Theory of Comprehension stipulates that a situation model (i.e., a mental representation) is constructed through interactions between child factors (i.e., individual differences in a child's abilities) and text factors (i.e., individual differences across texts). Both linguistic child factors (e.g., vocabulary and morphosyntax) and social child factors (e.g., social communication and theory of mind) predict reading comprehension in autistic children. However, these factors have not been examined for listening comprehension in autistic children and have only been examined for more social texts. Text factors (e.g., word concreteness and narrativity) impact comprehension in non-autistic individuals but have all but been ignored for autistic individuals.

The goal of this study is to examine how social information in texts impacts listening comprehension of stories in 9- to 12-year-old autistic children. Further, how listening comprehension of more or less social stories predicts reading comprehension on a standardized reading comprehension measure will also be assessed. In addition, individual differences in cognition, language, and social communication will be evaluated to determine how individual differences across children impacts comprehension and may predict response to intervention in future studies. The primary hypothesis is that stories with less social content (i.e, less social texts) will improve comprehension in autistic children compared to stories with more social content (i.e., more social texts). The secondary hypothesis is that comprehension or more social stories will better predict reading comprehension performance because these measures tend to include stories with more social information. In addition, both child and text factors impact comprehension and that social and linguistic child and text factors differentially contribute, depending on the content of the text. That is, the linguistic factors will predict comprehension across text type whereas the social factors will specifically predict comprehension of more social texts. The proposed project lays the methodological and empirical groundwork for using a precision medicine approach to identify and manipulate child and text factors for novel, effective comprehension interventions for autistic individuals.

After completing eligibility, participants will complete an experimental measure, the Socialness Story Task, that measures children's comprehension of more social and less social stories. Participants will also complete a standardized test of reading comprehension. In addition, participants will complete various experimental and standardized tests of nonverbal cognition, hearing status, autism severity, language, and social communication to assess individual differences. Participants complete all measures across two, 2.5 hour sessions.

Вмешательства

• Поведенческое More Social Stories
  Children listen to four stories while looking at accompanying images that contain more social information (e.g., characters referencing, dialogue, mental and emotional state words, and narrativity) as measured by a text analysis.
• Поведенческое Less Social Stories
  Children listen to four stories while looking at accompanying images that contain less social information (e.g., characters referencing, dialogue, mental and emotional state words, and narrativity) as measured by a text analysis.

Первичные конечные точки

• Percent of correct comprehension questions for more social stories at baseline [Срок оценки: Baseline]
• Percent of correct comprehension questions for less social stories at baseline [Срок оценки: Baseline]

Вторичные конечные точки (1)

• Reading comprehension as measured by the Gray Oral Reading Test, Fifth Edition (GORT-5) at baseline [Срок оценки: Baseline]

Критерии участия

Критерии включения

• Has a community or educational autism diagnosis (based on parent report);
• Is between the ages of 9;0 to 12;11 (years; months);
• Uses verbal phrase-level spoken language (based on parent report).

Критерии исключения

• Speaks more than one language (based on parent report);
• Has a known chromosomal abnormality (e.g., Fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome; based on parent report);
• Has an intellectual impairment or cognitive disability (IQ < 70; based on parent report);
• Has Cerebral palsy (based on parent report);
• Uncorrected visual impairments (based on parent report);
• Minimal spoken language or no phrase spoken language (based on parent report or clinical observation).

Критерии приведены из реестра в оригинале (на английском). Окончательную оценку соответствия проводит исследовательский центр.

Здоровые добровольцы: Нет

Дизайн исследования

Распределение

Не применимо

Модель

Одна группа

Маскирование

Открытое

Основная цель

Фундаментальное исследование

Центры проведения

США · 1 центр

• University of Kansas Comprehension and Language Learning Lab — Lawrence

Публикации

• Bodner KE, Engelhardt CR, Minshew NJ, Williams DL. Making Inferences: Comprehension of Physical Causality, Intentionality, and Emotions in Discourse by High-Functioning Older Children, Adolescents, and Adults with Autism. J Autism Dev Disord. 2015 Sep;45(9):2721-33. doi: 10.1007/s10803-015-2436-3. PMID 25821925
• Chevallier C, Parish-Morris J, McVey A, Rump KM, Sasson NJ, Herrington JD, Schultz RT. Measuring social attention and motivation in autism spectrum disorder using eye-tracking: Stimulus type matters. Autism Res. 2015 Oct;8(5):620-8. doi: 10.1002/aur.1479. Epub 2015 Jun 10. PMID 26069030
• Davidson MM. Reading Comprehension in School-Age Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Examining the Many Components That May Contribute. Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch. 2021 Jan 19;52(1):181-196. doi: 10.1044/2020_LSHSS-20-00010. Epub 2021 Jan 18. PMID 33464982
• Davidson MM, Ellis Weismer S. Characterization and prediction of early reading abilities in children on the autism spectrum. J Autism Dev Disord. 2014 Apr;44(4):828-45. doi: 10.1007/s10803-013-1936-2. PMID 24022730
• Davidson MM, Ellis Weismer S. Reading comprehension of ambiguous sentences by school-age children with autism spectrum disorder. Autism Res. 2017 Dec;10(12):2002-2022. doi: 10.1002/aur.1850. Epub 2017 Aug 22. PMID 28834327
• Davidson MM, Fleming KK. Story Comprehension Monitoring Across Visual, Listening, and Written Modalities in Children with and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord. 2023 Jan;53(1):1-24. doi: 10.1007/s10803-021-05418-6. Epub 2022 Jan 7. PMID 34994926
• Davidson MM, Kaushanskaya M, Ellis Weismer S. Reading Comprehension in Children With and Without ASD: The Role of Word Reading, Oral Language, and Working Memory. J Autism Dev Disord. 2018 Oct;48(10):3524-3541. doi: 10.1007/s10803-018-3617-7. PMID 29802485
• Devine RT, Hughes C. Silent films and strange stories: theory of mind, gender, and social experiences in middle childhood. Child Dev. 2013 May-Jun;84(3):989-1003. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12017. Epub 2012 Nov 30. PMID 23199139

Идентификаторы

NCT: NCT06116552 · STUDY00149319 · R21DC020786

Первоисточники (государственные реестры)

• ClinicalTrials.gov (NIH, США)

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