COMPUTER SPEECH-BASED TRAINING OF LITERACY SKILLS IN NEUROLOGICALLY IMPAIRED CHILDREN - A CONTROLLED EVALUATION

This research was supported by a grant to M.W.L. and R.W.B. from the MCSS Research Grants Program. This program is sponsored by the Ministry of Community and Social Services, Ontario Government and administered by the Research and Program Evaluation Unit in cooperation with the Ontario Mental Health Foundation. We are especially grateful to the 22 children enrolled in the training programs for their interest, enthusiasm, and effort and to their parents and schools for their commitment and cooperation for the duration of this study. The cooperation and contribution of the principal and staff of Sunny View School are particularly acknowledged. We extend special thanks to Rosa Giovinazzo and Jane Kelly for their help with preparing instructional materials for DECtalk implementation. to Rosa Giovinazzo and Julie L'Heureux for their assistance in testing the children, and to Carolyn Kroeber and Jane Collins for data coding and statistical analyses. Finally, we acknowledge the special contributions of Robert McCabe for computer programming and Dr. Tony Vitale of Digital Equipment Corporation for technical advice on the adaptation of DECtalk for the segmented speech conditions used in the present study. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Maureen W. Lovett, The Hospital for Sick Children. 555 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5G 1X8. Twenty-two reading-disabled children were randomly assigned to one of four training conditions to evaluate the effectiveness of a computer speech-based system for training literacy skills. The sample included 17 children with significant neurological impairment of various etiologies (including spina bifida and hydrocephalus, seizure disorder, brain tumors, cerebral palsy, and head injury) and five developmental dyslexics. The training employed a ''talking'' computer system that provides synthesized speech feedback during the course of learning. The training conditions included three word recognition and spelling-training programs and a math-training control program. Three different literacy-training procedures were compared, with the size of the trained print-to-sound unit varying as letter-sound (LSD: train --> t/r/ai/n): onset-rime (OR: train --> tr/ain) and whole word units (WW: train --> train). All literacy-training groups made significant gains in word recognition and spelling. with the LSD- and OR-trained subjects making the greatest word recognition gains on the words that could be trained with segmented speech feedback (i.e., words with regular spelling-to-sound patterns). All literacy-training groups demonstrated significant transfer on uninstructed rhymes of instructed regular words, with the greatest degree of transfer achieved by the LSD-trained subjects. These findings suggest that the neurologically impaired children were able to profit from instructional procedures that segment the printed word into units corresponding to onsets, rimes, and phonemes and that this segmentation training may facilitate transfer-of-training for them. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.