This article describes the design, implementation and evaluation of an educational video game that helps individuals with Down syndrome to improve their speech skills, specifically those related to prosody. Special attention has been paid to the design of the user interface, taking into account the cognitive, learning and attentional limitations of people with Down syndrome. The learning content is conveyed by activities of production and perception of prosodic phenomena, aimed at increasing their communicative competence. These activities are introduced within the narrative of a video game, so that the players do not conceive the tool as a mere succession of learning activities, but so that they learn and improve their speech while playing. The evaluation strategy that has been followed involves real users and combines different evaluation activities. Results show a high level of acceptance by participants and also by professionals, speech therapists and special education teachers.
Oral productions of speakers with Down syndrome exhibit special characteristics that have been the target of study for decades. In spite of this attention, the availability of rich resources for its analysis is still scarce. In this paper, we present the definition and compiling procedure of a corpus of semicontrolled oral productions of speakers with Down syndrome that aims to allow the analysis of how these speakers with these speakers produce functional and linguistic aspects of speech. The PRAUTOCAL corpus has been recorded while using a video game for training oral competences. Utterances are related to well defined communicative tasks recorded by both speakers with Down syndrome and typically developing speakers. We present the procedure for human experts to evaluate the recordings and the transcription criteria followed for enriching the utterances of the corpus. PRAUTOCAL permits the analysis of the clear contrast in voice and speech between individuals with Down syndrome and typically developing speakers, taking into account the high heterogeneity of the speech problems characteristic of the syndrome. This material allows the analysis of the speech problems in Down syndrome, with applications to the generation of knowledge that could be used in future works for therapists to prepare specific training or enriching diagnosis regarding possible speech and language disorders.
This chapter explores the commonalities and differences in hope between Spanish (N = 206) and South African (N = 100) samples based on data collected with the Hope Barometer in November 2018. Furthermore, we investigate similarities and differences in the sources of hope between the two samples, as reflected in the activities that people engage in to fulfil their hopes and to attain the hoped-for targets (hope activities). Finally, we examine these activities as predictors of hope. Since hope is an important predictor of flourishing, we also analyze the predictive power of hope and its dimensions on flourishing in both samples, using two different measures and conceptualizations of hope (perceived hope and dispositional hope). Finally, we explore the role of sociodemographic indicators as predictors of hope and flourishing. Our results indicated that South African participants had higher levels of hope than the Spanish sample. We also found differences and commonalities in terms of endorsement of specific hope activities. The results indicated that perceived hope was a strong predictor of flourishing in both samples, supporting the idea that perceived hope may be a universal motivational need applicable across cultures. These findings highlight the need to carry out more cross-cultural studies on hope and paves the way for further cross-cultural understanding of this important human resource.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.