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VAULT context variability (Alt et al., 2025)

online resource
posted on 2025-01-22, 19:21 authored by Mary Alt, Heidi M. Mettler, Elissa S. Schiff, Nora Evans-Reitz, Rebecca Burton, Sarah R. Cretcher, Allison Staib

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine if the Vocabulary Acquisition and Usage for Late Talkers (VAULT) intervention could be efficaciously applied to a new treatment target: words a child neither understood nor said. We also assessed whether the type of context variability used to encourage semantic learning (i.e., action or object) would affect learning outcomes.

Method: Nineteen primarily English-speaking late-talking toddlers received 8 weeks of VAULT intervention. They were quasirandomly assigned to a condition that highlighted either object or action variability. Individual effect sizes were calculated for target (treated) and control (not treated) words for each child. These were combined to assess group-level comparisons of treatment efficacy and treatment conditions. Generalization of the word-learning ability was assessed by comparing rates of learning on a vocabulary checklist prior to and during intervention. Bayesian statistics (e.g., t tests, analysis of variance) were used for the analyses.

Results: There was strong evidence for a treatment effect showing that children produced more target than control words and moderate evidence that they understood more target than control words. There was strong evidence for generalization. Children learned an average of 6.8 words per week during treatment. There was anecdotal evidence for no difference between treatment conditions.

Conclusions: VAULT, with a focus on context variability, can be used efficaciously to teach children to say words they do not understand at the start of treatment. The effects were most pronounced in the generalization data. Additionally, children were able to learn later-acquired words.

Supplemental Material S1. Additional methodological details.

Supplemental Material S2. Details of analysis plan.

Supplemental Material S3. Individual child performance on unique number of target and control words produced during the baseline and treatment phases.

Alt, M., Mettler, H. M., Schiff, E. S., Evans-Reitz, N., Burton, R., Cretcher, S. R., & Staib, A. (2025). 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, 68(2), 579–601. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00410

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Grant 1R01 DC015642-01, awarded to Mary Alt and Elena Plante.

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