15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Development and Evaluation of a Computer-Animated Tutor for Language and Vocabulary Learning

Dominic W. Massaro, Alexis Bosseler, Joanna Light

University of California at Santa Cruz, USA

After making the case for the value of the direct teaching of vocabulary and computer-aided instruction, we review two studies using a Language Wizard/Player for teaching new vocabulary items to hard of hearing and autistic children. To insure that the program itself was responsible for the learning, we used a within student multiple baseline design where certain words were continuously being tested while other words were being tested and trained. Knowledge of the words remained negligible without training and learning occurred fairly quickly for all words once training began Finally, knowledge of the trained words did not degrade after training, generalized to new images, and was retained at least 4 weeks after training ended.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Massaro, Dominic W. / Bosseler, Alexis / Light, Joanna (2003): "Development and evaluation of a computer-animated tutor for language and vocabulary learning", In ICPhS-15, 143-146.