Poster E77, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:45 – 5:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
The effect of seeing written word-form on spoken foreign-language learning in children
Katja Junttila1, Anna-Riikka Smolander1, Reima Karhila2, Seppo Enarvi3, Mikko Kurimo2, Risto Näätänen1,4, Sari Ylinen1;1University of Helsinki, 2Aalto University, 3Nuance Communications, 4University of Tartu
The pronunciation of written English words is not always straightforward for Finnish speakers without knowledge of the English language. Some written forms are misleading, like the word ‘jet’, which might be pronounced by a naïve Finnish speaker as /jet/ and confused with the word ‘yet’. Our study investigated how seeing a potentially misleading written word form affects the spoken foreign-word learning in children. Additionally, we investigated how the effects differ in children with dyslexia compared to typically reading children. We hypothesised that seeing misleading written form of the word might hinder the learning of spoken words. Furthermore, we hypothesised that children with dyslexia could be more affected by these misleading words due to their reading impairments. The participants were 7-11-year-old monolingual Finnish-speaking typically reading children (n=34) and children with dyslexia (n=24). They rehearsed spoken English words with the “Say it again, kid!” (SIAK) computer game that is played by imitating the spoken English words heard in the game. The automatic speech recognition of the game gives the player feedback on the accuracy of their pronunciation. In the game, half of the participants only heard the spoken words and the other half both heard the spoken words and saw their written forms. Of the several words trained with the game, ‘jet’ and ‘yet’ were used as stimuli during electroencephalography (EEG) measurement. Before and after playing the game, we recorded event-related potentials (ERP) while presenting the auditory standard word ‘jet’ and deviant word ‘yet’ in an oddball paradigm. We compared the ERP responses of the children who saw the written forms during the game to those of the children who only heard the spoken words. An increase in mismatch negativity (MMN) responses indicating better ability to distinguish the stimulus words was observed in typically reading children who saw the written forms while rehearsing, and in children with dyslexia who did not see the written forms. This suggests that typically reading children benefited from seeing the written form contrary to children with dyslexia whose learning was impeded by seeing it. These results indicate that spoken foreign-language training free from written word-forms can aid children with dyslexia in learning foreign languages. However, the same kind of training might not be best for typically reading children who could benefit more from also seeing the word-form to which the spoken word is connected to.
Themes: Speech Perception, Disorders: Developmental
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)