Background
Developmental language disorder (DLD)
DLD is one of the most common developmental disorders and is present in about 7% of all children. DLD has a major negative effect on the health and life quality of the children and young adults that are affected by it. Treatments that exist for DLD only have moderate effects, and it takes a long time to get results. There is a large need to develop treatments that can help students with DLD to develop the vocabulary they need for school and daily life.
Captain Morph
Captain Morph is a digital word-learning tool developed for a previous research project, The Vocabulary Learning Challenge (VLC). This project aimed to develop and test a digital vocabulary intervention based on the following two principles:
- Strengthen the students’ knowledge of common Norwegian derivational morphemes.
- Use variation in input systematically to facilitate generalization of the linguistic knowledge.
The students worked with Captain Morph individually, and we found that the tool was an effective way for them to learn about morphology and strengthened their word knowledge. The TOBUS-project builds on the ideas and principles from this project.
TOBUS-project
In this new project, we want to develop and test two new versions of Captain Morph to test hypothesizes on how students with language difficulties can learn most effectively. Both of these versions will be developed for two players cooperating, with one version focusing on collaboration between two students, while the other is aimed towards collaboration between a student and an adult.
Sub-studies
The project consists of multiple sub-studies:
- In the first intervention study, we examine if children with low scores on language tests gain more from collaborating with other students in the multiplayer version of the digital tool compared to working on their own. The project "The leader learns it all?" will look closer at more general learning effects of the multiplayer version. Read more here.
- In the second intervention study, students that need extra language support will work together with an adult. We want to look at the effect of tasks that focus on recalling target words compared to just focusing on understanding the words. If the treatment is effective, we plan to study brain activity to identify the aspects of the language processing that is affected by this kind of teaching. These insights can help improve the treatment further.
Results
The primary gain of the project would be concrete recommendations on how we most effectively can support children with language disorders in learning new words. The study on brain activity will also give us a better understanding of learning mechanisms that are affected by this teaching. The results will give us a better foundation for developing new teaching programs.
