Learning Prosody in a Video Game-Based Learning Approach

Abstract

With the growth in popularity of video games in our society many teachers have worked to incorporate gaming into their classroom. It is generally agreed that by adding something fun to the learning process students become more engaged and, consequently, retain more knowledge. However, although the characteristics of video games facilitate the dynamics of the educational process it is necessary to plan a pedagogical project that includes delimitation of learning goals and profile of the addressees, the conditions of application of the educational project, and the methodologies of evaluation of the learning progress. This is how we can make a real difference between gamification and video game based learning. The paper addresses the design of an educational resource for special education needs (SEN) students that aims to help teach communicative skills related to prosody. The technological choices made to support the pedagogic issues that underlie the educational product, the strategies to convert learning content into playful material, and the methodology to obtain measures of its playability and effectiveness are described. The results of the motivation test certified that the video game is useful in encouraging the users to exercise their voice and the indicators of the degree of achievement of the learning goals serve to identify the most affected prosodic skills.

Virtual Reality Technology as an Educational and Intervention Tool for Autism Spectrum Disorder: Current Perspectives and Future Directions

“…To systematically improve social communication performance that involves various social domains, future VR-based ASD intervention systems can lay more emphasis on the training and learning of prosody, which plays a vital role in a range of communicative functions (linguistic/grammatical, pragmatic, affective, etc.) [165] and the correct use of which, promoting peer interaction and socialization, is fundamental for both personal development and social integration of individuals with ASD [166]. Prosody functions at three major levels (not mutually exclusive) to enable smooth social communication: grammatical prosody is crucial for the expression of semantic meaning (e.g., resolving semantic ambiguity); pragmatic prosody conveys the speaker's intentions (e.g., emphasizing certain information); affective prosody implies the speaker's emotions or affective states (e.g., feeling happy or sad, relaxed or anxious) [167].…”

PRAUTOCAL corpus: a corpus for the study of Down syndrome prosodic aspects

“…As detailed in González-Ferreras et al (2017) and Aguilar (2019), the video game has the structure of a graphic adventure game, providing conversations with characters and navigation through scenarios. The video game includes three types of activities: comprehension, production and visual cognitive activities.…”

“…We used three different versions of the same video game to compile the corpus: the source version, called La piedra mágica, whose architecture is described in González-Ferreras et al (2017); a more elaborated and complete release called PRADIA (Aguilar, 2019), with the same game narrative, but with an increased number of games and tasks; and a simplified version that includes only the production activities that were used to collect audio samples from TD users. The current version of PRADIA can be used in three modalities, depending on how the quality of the spoken answers is evaluated to allow the player to continue: automatic decision, three-level human based decision or template-based human based decision (detailed in section 4.1.2).…”

Evaluating the Impact of an Autonomous Playing Mode in a Learning Game to Train Oral Skills of Users With Down Syndrome

“…PRADIA is an evolved version of "La Piedra Mágica" that includes a module for reporting information about player performance [53]. All the information about the user interaction (timing, number of attempts to complete a task, number of mouse clicks, number of helps showed to the user, .…”