More and Less Social Comprehension

NCT ID: NCT06116552

Last Updated: 2025-04-04

Study Results

Results pending

The study team has not published outcome measurements, participant flow, or safety data for this trial yet. Check back later for updates.

Basic Information

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Recruitment Status

RECRUITING

Clinical Phase

NA

Total Enrollment

50 participants

Study Classification

INTERVENTIONAL

Study Start Date

2023-07-10

Study Completion Date

2025-12-31

Brief Summary

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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.

Detailed Description

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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.

Conditions

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Autism Spectrum Disorder

Study Design

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Allocation Method

NA

Intervention Model

SINGLE_GROUP

A within-subjects design is used where participants complete both treatments: listening to more social stories and less social stories.
Primary Study Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Blinding Strategy

NONE

Study Groups

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More and Less Social Comprehension

Participants listen to more social and less social comprehension stories and answer comprehension questions about the stories.

Group Type EXPERIMENTAL

More Social Stories

Intervention Type BEHAVIORAL

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.

Less Social Stories

Intervention Type BEHAVIORAL

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.

Interventions

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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.

Intervention Type BEHAVIORAL

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.

Intervention Type BEHAVIORAL

Eligibility Criteria

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Inclusion Criteria

* 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).

Exclusion Criteria

* 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).
Minimum Eligible Age

9 Years

Maximum Eligible Age

12 Years

Eligible Sex

ALL

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

No

Sponsors

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National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)

NIH

Sponsor Role collaborator

University of Kansas

OTHER

Sponsor Role collaborator

University of Kansas Medical Center

OTHER

Sponsor Role lead

Responsible Party

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Meghan M. Davidson, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Responsibility Role PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR

Principal Investigators

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Meghan M Davidson, PhD, CCC-SLP

Role: STUDY_DIRECTOR

University of Kansas Department of Speech-Language Hearing: Communications and Disorders

Locations

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University of Kansas Comprehension and Language Learning Lab

Lawrence, Kansas, United States

Site Status RECRUITING

Countries

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United States

Central Contacts

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Meghan M Davidson, PhD, CCC-SLP

Role: CONTACT

785-864-6430

Thomas Gottstein

Role: CONTACT

785-864-6037

Facility Contacts

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Thomas Gottstein

Role: primary

785-864-6037

Meghan M Davidson, PhD, CCC-SLP

Role: backup

785-864-6430

References

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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.

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Reference Type BACKGROUND
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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.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
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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.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 34994926 (View on PubMed)

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.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
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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.

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Reference Type BACKGROUND
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Judd CM, Westfall J, Kenny DA. Experiments with More Than One Random Factor: Designs, Analytic Models, and Statistical Power. Annu Rev Psychol. 2017 Jan 3;68:601-625. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033702. Epub 2016 Sep 28.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 27687116 (View on PubMed)

Kim YG. Toward Integrative Reading Science: The Direct and Indirect Effects Model of Reading. J Learn Disabil. 2020 Nov/Dec;53(6):469-491. doi: 10.1177/0022219420908239. Epub 2020 Mar 3.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 32125226 (View on PubMed)

Lord C, Charman T, Havdahl A, Carbone P, Anagnostou E, Boyd B, Carr T, de Vries PJ, Dissanayake C, Divan G, Freitag CM, Gotelli MM, Kasari C, Knapp M, Mundy P, Plank A, Scahill L, Servili C, Shattuck P, Simonoff E, Singer AT, Slonims V, Wang PP, Ysrraelit MC, Jellett R, Pickles A, Cusack J, Howlin P, Szatmari P, Holbrook A, Toolan C, McCauley JB. The Lancet Commission on the future of care and clinical research in autism. Lancet. 2022 Jan 15;399(10321):271-334. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(21)01541-5. Epub 2021 Dec 6. No abstract available.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 34883054 (View on PubMed)

McIntyre NS, Solari EJ, Gonzales JE, Solomon M, Lerro LE, Novotny S, Oswald TM, Mundy PC. The Scope and Nature of Reading Comprehension Impairments in School-Aged Children with Higher-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord. 2017 Sep;47(9):2838-2860. doi: 10.1007/s10803-017-3209-y.

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Nation K, Clarke P, Wright B, Williams C. Patterns of reading ability in children with autism spectrum disorder. J Autism Dev Disord. 2006 Oct;36(7):911-9. doi: 10.1007/s10803-006-0130-1.

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Peristeri E, Baldimtsi E, Andreou M, Tsimpli IM. The impact of bilingualism on the narrative ability and the executive functions of children with autism spectrum disorders. J Commun Disord. 2020 May-Jun;85:105999. doi: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2020.105999. Epub 2020 May 3.

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Ricketts J, Jones CR, Happe F, Charman T. Reading comprehension in autism spectrum disorders: the role of oral language and social functioning. J Autism Dev Disord. 2013 Apr;43(4):807-16. doi: 10.1007/s10803-012-1619-4.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
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Westerveld MF, Filiatrault-Veilleux P, Paynter J. Inferential narrative comprehension ability of young school-age children on the autism spectrum. Autism Dev Lang Impair. 2021 Sep 7;6:23969415211035666. doi: 10.1177/23969415211035666. eCollection 2021 Jan-Dec.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 36531336 (View on PubMed)

Other Identifiers

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R21DC020786

Identifier Type: NIH

Identifier Source: secondary_id

View Link

STUDY00149319

Identifier Type: -

Identifier Source: org_study_id

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