Poster E74, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:45 – 5:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
Gaming in children's foreign-language learning
Sari Ylinen1, Katja Junttila1, Anna-Riikka Smolander1, Maria Uther2, Reima Karhila3, Seppo Enarvi3, Mikko Kurimo3, Risto Näätänen1;1University of Helsinki, 2University of Wolverhampton, 3Aalto University
Language and communication skills will be increasingly important. Future learning will likely be assisted by technology, and initiatives to improve foreign-language skills and to stimulate learning and teaching through ICT and digital content are needed. Digital learning environments using the gaming approach have great potential especially in children's foreign-language learning which requires extensive training. We have designed a digital game Say it again, kid! that aims to support children’s learning of spoken foreign language. Children are stimulated to speak English and advanced speech technology is used to assess their utterances. This automatized assessment enables the game to reinforce learning by providing feedback. We sought to investigate the effect of gaming approach in children’s foreign-language learning. The learning effects of the game were evaluated by measuring the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of event-related potential (ERP). 37 typical readers and 24 children with dyslexia (7-11-year-old) trained with the game for about 5 weeks (4-5 days per week, 15-20 minutes per day) and participated in EEG measurements before (pre-test) and after (post-test) the gaming period. To reveal the effect of gaming, learning was compared in two conditions: 1) a game condition with game boards that the children could freely explore and 2) a non-game condition with white screen and forced presentation of English words. In the game condition, feedback (1-5 stars) was used as a game element (the stars enabled to proceed on the game board), whereas non-game condition provided no feedback. To control for the effect of exposure on learning, the number of English words presented in each condition was the same. In typical readers, the MMN responses were significantly larger in the post-test than in the pre-test in the gaming condition, but not after using the non-game, suggesting that gaming induced more robust plastic changes in the brain. However, children with dyslexia did not show increased MMN after gaming. Thus, they do not seem to benefit from gaming similarly to typical readers. Since striatum as part of the reward system of the brain has been suggested to show structural and functional abnormalities in children with language disorders, a possible account for seeing gaming effects in typical readers but not in children with dyslexia is differences in the activation of striatum. The findings are applicable to language teaching and the development of language-learning applications for children.
Themes: Speech Perception, Disorders: Developmental
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)