Dr. Plante Awarded NIH Grant

Dr. Elena Plante is expanding her work on developing evidence-based treatments.  She is a co-principal investigator on a new NIH grant that is being conducted at four sites nationally (Arizona, Ohio, Utah, West Virgina).  This new grant will fund two clinical trials that will contrast two distinct methods of helping children with Developmental Language Disorder strengthen their grasp of complex sentence forms.  One treatment method involves explicit instruction concerning the syntactic forms and the other leverages implicit learning methods.  This will be the first time that these two approaches are directly compared, despite the fact that each approach has a history of use in our field.  Treatment will target understanding and use of passive sentences and those containing relative clauses.  School-aged children frequently encounter these sentences in written language as well as in spoken language.  Struggles with these forms can interfere significantly with reading comprehension, writing, and classroom learning during the school years.  Three hundred children ages 8-11 will be enrolled over the next four years and referrals are currently being solicited. 

If you are interested in participating or know someone who may, you can learn more from this informational flyer: