NCT06504264

The Effect of Articulatory Gestures on Early Literacy Skills in 4-year Olds

The Effect of Articulatory Gestures on Word Reading, Non-word Reading, and Phonemic Segmentation in 4-year Olds

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 9 (actual)
• Sponsor: Montclair State University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 48 Months – 59 Months
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This study will use an experimental design to explore if articulatory gestures (with letters and phonemic awareness training) enhance early literacy skills more than general mouth awareness training (with letters and phonemic awareness training) or letter/phonemic awareness training alone.

Detailed description

Multisensory reading strategies, which recruit one or more of the five senses, are routinely used in general education classrooms as well as with children who are struggling readers. Despite their wide use in schools, little research exists to substantiate the utilizing these strategies to enhance literacy. One type of multisensory reading strategy, articulatory gestures, is of particular interest to speech-language pathologists (SLPs) as they are uniquely positioned to provide speech sound placement cues. Limitations of the few prior studies that exist have prevented the isolation of the articulatory gestures themselves as the main contributor to the gains seen in literacy. This study aims to control for factors such as motivation, engagement, and time on task to explore the specific contribution of articulation strategies during phonemic awareness training on phoneme segmentation, reading of phonemically spelled words, and nonword reading in typically developing four-year old children. Using an experimental design, participants will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions: 1) phonemic awareness training with articulatory gestures, 2) phonemic awareness training with general mouth pictures, and 3) phonemic awareness training with no mouth/articulation pictures at all. Interventions will focus on phoneme-letter correspondence and phonemic segmentation using strategies specific to each group and differences between groups will be considered for pre and posttest measures.

Conditions

• Early Literacy
• Articulatory Gestures
• Phonemic Awareness

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	phonemic segmentation	during phonemic segmentation activities, articulatory gestures will be used while teaching letters and their sounds.

Timeline

• Start date: 2024-09-01
• Primary completion: 2025-06-30
• Completion: 2025-06-30
• First posted: 2024-07-16
• Last updated: 2025-09-25

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States