Trial reportJournal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR2017
Do the Hard Things First: A Randomized Controlled Trial Testing the Effects of Exemplar Selection on Generalization Following Therapy for Grammatical Morphology.
Trial report in Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT03977701 (Manipulating Linguistic Complexity to Improve Child Language Treatment Outcomes), which is not on this map. Cited by 23 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Manipulating Linguistic Complexity to Improve Child Language Treatment Outcomes
Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Not All Planes Have Propellers: Using Context Variability to Treat Word Learning in Late Talkers With the Vocabulary Acquisition and Usage for Late Talkers Protocol.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2025Trial
- Effects of a Complexity-Based Approach on Generalization of Past Tense -ed and Related Morphemes.Language, speech, and hearing services in schools · 2018Trial
- Learning to Learn: Initial Treatment of a Partially Acquired Grammatical Form Speeds Later Learning of Rarely Used Forms for Children With Developmental Language Disorder.Language, speech, and hearing services in schools · 2026Article
- Exploring Explicit Intervention to Target Grammatical Forms With Spanish-English Bilingual Children With Developmental Language Disorder.Language, speech, and hearing services in schools · 2025Article
- Assessing Perceptual Difficulty Across Speech Sound Categories and Contrasts to Optimize Minimal Pair Training.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2025Article
- What Matters When Providing Conversational Recast Treatment? A Multilevel Modeling Analysis.American journal of speech-language pathology · 2025Article
- Neural Correlates of Telicity in Spanish-Speaking Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Five Additional Evidence-Based Principles to Facilitate Grammar Development for Children With Developmental Language Disorder.American journal of speech-language pathology · 2024Article
- Verbs Matter: A Tutorial for Determining Verb Difficulty.American journal of speech-language pathology · 2023Article
- The competition-compensation account of developmental language disorder.Developmental science · 2023Article
- Word-final complexity in speech sound intervention: two case studies.Clinical linguistics & phonetics · 2023Article
- Using Theory to Drive Intervention Efficacy: The Role of Dose Form in Interventions for Children with DLD.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Phonological complexity in intervention for Spanish-speaking children with speech sound disorder.Clinical linguistics & phonetics · 2022Article
- Predictors of Treatment Response for Preschool Children With Developmental Language Disorder.American journal of speech-language pathology · 2020Article
- Data-Informed Guideposts for Decision Making in Enhanced Conversational Recast Treatment.American journal of speech-language pathology · 2020Article
- Optimal Contexts for Verb Learning.Perspectives of the ASHA special interest groups · 2019Article
- Treatment Targets for Co-Occurring Speech-Language Impairment: A Case Study.Perspectives of the ASHA special interest groups · 2019Article
- Individual Differences in Verb Bias Sensitivity in Children and Adults With Developmental Language Disorder.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2019Article
- Neuroplasticity of Language Networks in Aphasia: Advances, Updates, and Future Challenges.Frontiers in neurology · 2019Review
- Individual and Developmental Differences in Distributional Learning.Language, speech, and hearing services in schools · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Purpose: Complexity-based approaches to treatment have been gaining popularity in domains such as phonology and aphasia but have not yet been tested in child morphological acquisition. In this study, we examined whether beginning treatment with easier-to-inflect (easy first) or harder-to-inflect (hard first) verbs led to greater progress in the production of regular past-tense -ed by children with developmental language disorder. Method: Eighteen children with developmental language disorder (ages 4-10) participated in a randomized controlled trial (easy first, N = 10, hard first, N = 8). Verbs were selected on the basis of frequency, phonological complexity, and telicity (i.e., the completedness of the event). Progress was measured by the duration of therapy, number of verb lists trained to criterion, and pre/post gains in accuracy for trained and untrained verbs on structured probes. Results: The hard-first group made greater gains in accuracy on both trained and untrained verbs but did not have fewer therapy visits or train to criterion on more verb lists than the easy-first group. Treatment fidelity, average recasts per session, and verbs learned did not differ across conditions. Conclusion: When targeting grammatical morphemes, it may be most efficient for clinicians to select harder rather than easier exemplars of the target.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.