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Computer Activities for Those With Speech and Language Difficulties?
An anonymous reader writes "My girlfriend is training to be a speech and language therapist here in the UK (speech pathologist in the US). A number of clients are guys who enjoy playing computer games, and for a variety of reasons some have no incentive to try and improve their speech. The issue is, this can obviously inhibit options for jobs and/or other aspects of life. I was trying to think of fun computer-based activities for those with speech and language difficulties that encourage individuals to speak, and furthermore to speak with greater clarity. Or games/activities that might encourage them to do more speech work. The first options that sprang to mind were the online games with team-speak / team-talk for those with mild difficulties. The sampling / accent issue might force them to speak with greater clarity or wish to have that ability. Obviously, they can just type. Any thoughts?"
How significant a speech impairment are you talking about?
If it is only a speech issue (like a lisp) and they don't value the therapy, then I'm not sure what to say. I know a guy here who has quirky speech, but he's doing fine as an engineering student at a major university.
The reason we target speech in kids so heavily is that speech issues may (although not always) be a symptom of an underlying language problem that interferes with many other aspects of language. It's not just making kids talk better; it's more about giving kids who need it a redundant channel to learn phonology, morphology, and syntax.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
Tom Clancy's Endwar. Have to speak clearly to control the RTS game, without the possible embarrassment of talking to real people in an online game.
I'm almost ready to teach myself multimedia programming -- i'd love to have a simple program that would show a picture of an object, say the name of the object ("Say 'snake'") and then record the child saying the word, then play it back for them to hear themselves saying it through headphones. Icing would be if it could somehow evaluate the word and maybe have them try a 2nd or third time if they didn't get it right.
Even more icing would be to make it fun on some level.
There's lots of stuff out there but it's way more expensive and/or complex then just the simple computer program described used to augment traditional speech therapy.
And it doesn't understand me, it usually just pisses me off, rather than cures my speech. :-/
Unless you want me to speak very loud and slow to everyone!
automated POS: "would you like to... say yes for option one"
me: "yes"
robot: "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that, please repeat"
me: "YES"
robot: " I'm sorry, I didn't understand that, please repeat... or press 1 for yes, 2 for no"
[furiously presses 1]
Sent from my PDP-11
I've just been discharged from a neuro-rehabilitation unit in the states to treat the aftermath of a 6 cm benign tumor resection in my right-frontal lobe. I didn't participate with the full program of offering, but I did have a very good Speech therapist who didn't focus just on language but also on things like deductive reasoning, scanning for words in blocks of text, and other interesting cognitive exercises. One of the things we did was work on what are sometimes called Quizzles, or logic puzzles. Where you are given a situation and a set of clues, and you are left to decide how to solve the puzzle, given that only one condition per subset could be true, resulting in the negation of the rest of the options. At first they were difficult because my brain was just tired (I was going through radiation treatments simultaneously), but after a time, they got easier as I was healing and the other therapies I was receiving was taking hold.
One of the programs she had also introduced me to was a program called "Brain Train" which had a whole subset of interesting ways of interpreting problems and coming up with a solution. One of those ended up being an interactive Towers of Hanoi puzzle. Since I'm able to write code, I had to go back into memory and remember the way that was solvable using recursion. I didn't tell her that though.
Another thing that I think worked for me was the "Brain Age" titles for Nintendo DS. There's lots of things that don't pertain to speech, but there are some things that are.
I am the son of an SLP here in the states and a patient of hers as well. This was a fortunate situation for me because I got good therapy and I had parents that were involved. No software will ever replace good therapy with a good therapist / pathologist.
That being said, there are video and board games to be used as therapy tools and they are all geared toward children from preschool through high school. I created a video game about a year ago for just this purpose. The games require the player to get a speech bubble which cues a visual and auditory stimulus, then the player should repeat the stimulus with their best effort. You can even use it with a microphone so that the game continues after you say the word. It does not, however, do any speech recognition, just merely detecting audio activity.
You can download a small demo (Flash projector, demo is Win only but the game is Win / Mac) at the website, http://www.2galsspeechproducts.com/
Feel free to contact me directly if needed. leetrout _at_ gmail _dot_ com
My son's autistic. Playing video games with him made him much, much more verbal, taught him how to solve problems, express directions, give orders, and more.
This is my sig.
As someone going through this sort of therapy, I can tell you that if an individual has no incentive or desire, there is absolutely no point in trying.
Game team talk type things might help, but only if they have issues with that kind of situation. There is no substitute for real life trials.
No, we won't help you with your homework.
Sig: I stole this sig.
A number of clients are guys who enjoy playing computer games, and for a variety of reasons some have no incentive to try and improve their speech
I have every incentive. When you are split from the team, a boomer's just puked his bile over you, you're blind as a bat, and the zombie hoard is coming, you need to communicate quickly, concisely, and clearly to your team mates. Since I have started using a mic for gaming , I find myself, mumbling less(such as at work), and becoming very proactive in the quality of my voice communication!
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
"some have no incentive to try and improve their speech."
If they have no incentive then don't bother with them. If someone isn't willing to work at something then there's no point helping them, they're still going to fail. If they have trouble getting employment, then that's an incentive right there. You don't need to create incentives for someone who doesn't want to try.
If there isn't an incentive then there usually isn't a problem. If they don't have trouble getting a job, don't have trouble working with people, don't want to talk to people online, then they're not likely to bother trying to improve their speech.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
A passle of good looking girls, a few beers, and these guys will have lots of incentive to hone their language skills.
It's like the old story of the kid who grew to be twelve years old without ever uttering a word. Doctors found nothing, psychologists found nothing, neurologists found nothing - there was no reason why he shouldn't talk.
One morning though he sat down at the kitchen table picked up his breakfast, and said "This porridge is cold!"
His startled Mother says "My God Tommy! You talked! What happened?"
Tommy looks at her and says "Until now everything was OK."
Three Squirrels
/r/ is by far the toughest one. It causes people in our profession much consternation. But, as you point out, if all of the other consonants are normal, having the /r/ be a little off isn't that big a deal. There's a wide range of what is intelligible to our ears.
Walters (along with many who grow up speaking Asian languages) cannot even hear the English /r/. She didn't get the joke when they impersonated her on SNL, for example. Some people's brains interpret that sound as something else entirely, which is why they can't produce it.
Some kids have even more extensive phonological problems where other sounds are interpreted as the same (/t/ sounds just like /k/, for example). This is a problem that can mess with reading and language learning beyond just the problem of "talking funny."
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
Slashdot editor?
I have discovered a truly marvelous
Note that the poster was in the UK - so does the speech recognition understand English or just American? I remember an incredibly frustrating phonecall using the United Airlines speech "recognition" system they used a while ago to give out flight times. Being British the damn thing completely failed to understand what I was saying until I guessed that it wanted a US accent. Amazingly my fake American accent was enough to get some comprehension from the system. So, unless whatever speech recognition you use is designed for British accents and language, all you may end up doing is exchanging one speech impediment for another!
OK, this is a somewhat random idea. There are a few games that use speech input (some have already been mentioned), but they are usually very finicky for someone without any speech problems, so I would think they would be very frustrating for people who have trouble.
So let me try a semi-random idea: what about Rosetta Stone?
Everyone's pronunciation sucks when they start learning a new language. If you could find one they are interested in for whatever reason (French, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, whatever) they could learn that language. Not only would that be a useful skill, but they would have to work at the new pronunciations. As they get better at those, they will improve their ability to pronounce those same sounds in English. Actually, a language that sounds rather different from English may be better as everything they say, right or wrong, will sound "foreign" and thus be less likely to trigger embarrassment.
The more of the language they learn, the more useful it becomes to them as they could talk to other people, watch TV/movies from a country that speaks that language, etc.
I got quite a lot of reading practice from video games as a kid. If they are the kind that might be motivated to learn a new language, it could really work.
By the time they decide "this is stupid", perhaps their speech will have improved enough for them to see it's worth while.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
>Walters (along with many who grow up speaking Asian languages) cannot even hear the English /r/.
Sorta like many Nepalis who can't tell the difference often between SS and SH and B and V. Interesting. I'm currently in the process of retraining my ears so that I can understand Nepali and spend a lot of time helping Nepali international students with English as well as basic life skills. I already speak or understand various languages to some degree, but some of the sounds in Nepali I have had to, or am in the process of, teaching my ears to even hear them properly.
Parent makes a lot of sense. Mod up.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
Talking about Walters, doesn't her carreer as a wildly successful news anchor contradict the OPs statement 'The issue is it can obviously inhibit options for jobs/other aspects of life etc.'. I don't think that it's obvious at all. The need for adult speech pathology seems massively overrated for most people in most professions if even news anchors can get away with having an impediment.
"A number of clients are guys who enjoy playing computer games, and for a variety of reasons some have no incentive to try and improve their speech."
This is pretty vague. There are many types of speech difficulties and many ways of dealing with them. As another poster pointed out, minor impediments are one thing, but problems related to physiological problems are more difficult to deal with.
My wife has Athetoid Cerebral Palsy which carries a side effect of her having Tongue Thrust. No degree of traditional speech therapy is going to allow her to control her tongue well enough to speak, although some old-school (and clueless) SLP's tried during her childhood. An Augmentative Alternative Communication (AAC) device, specifically this, was the solution for her. There is a huge technology industry supporting people with severe speech problems, and similar tech is covered by most insurance carriers in the U.S., including Medicare.
"The issue is it can obviously inhibit options for jobs/other aspects of life etc."
It can and does but it doesn't have to, nor should it. There is a lot more tolerance of disabilities today. We know many people with moderate to severe speech-affected disabilities who manage to lead lives which are not so much affected by by their speech as they are by other aspects of their disabilities. The bigger problem for people with certain types of congenital speech problems, is not speech itself but language and communication deficits which come as a result certain areas of the individual's brain not being developed to the same degree as those who go through the normal speech-learning process as children. Modern SLP's will recognize when tradional therapy is not only the wrong approach, but actually counter-productive.
"I was trying to think of fun computer based activities for those with speech and language difficulties that encourage individuals to speak and furthermore to speak with greater clarity."
There is a lot of software out there which can be used by therapists, and an SLP-in-training should have already been made aware of its existence by those experienced in the field. I think much of it though is probably aimed at the very young. Unfortunately the controlling factors are mostly social, and especially with males, once the teen years are reached, the mold is set unless the individual is already very self-motivated. One has to look at the person's social environment, the severity of the deficit ("I always have an aide who understands me") and at the nature of his support group ("I can already communicate with everyone who is important to me") and his own personal goals.
It seems you've asked for a solution to a very complex problem but haven't defined the problem set enough to suggest a pat solution (of which there are none anyway - each case is different enough from any other that there are few to no general solutions).
So I got him Postal 2. The times when he's setting characters on fire and putting them out by peeing on them is by far the happiest he's ever been. It's fun to see him find fulfillment, but I've taken to locking the bedroom door at night.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Hey, that's my job!
(Part of it, anyway. I work with kids with autism spectrum disorders and many, many of them have great difficulties with speech and language processing. They not only don't speak clearly (if at all) but they have trouble labeling objects both receptively (touch the couch!) and expressively (what is that? Couch!)). I'm really interested to see what people have to say about this. The best motivation I've found is to take away anything the kid really wants (food, drinks, toys, computer) and make them ask for it repeatedly during a session, modeling the appropriate way to ask (Picture Exchange Communication System, sign language, verbal cues, Dynavox, Dynawrite...) and then making sure that they are asking at the highest level they are able to reach. I won't take "waha" for "water" when I know they can say "wata". It can be frustrating for them but if you always reward with the item after they've made a few (good) attempts to ask, they'll very soon learn that it's worth speaking clearly so they don't have to go through "I didn't understand you - say it again!" six times. Once they know that communication is effective in fulfilling their desires you can work on shaping language to a clearer state. If they're not motivated you'll get nowhere. For some of them I'd honestly advocate putting them in a public setting with a list of questions they have to ask in order to find their way "home", standing back and watching. If they can't get passerby to understand them, and are capable of understanding -why- they aren't understood, they'll hopefully shape up their speech patterns as fast as they can at least to a level where most people can grasp what they're saying. Just don't do with the guys who are going to be easily frustrated or become violent (duh).
I can't play back a kid's voice without a tape recorder in hand, but I do a lot of modeling, overexaggerated lip movements and bouncing around to make it fun and I can react a lot better than a computer can to a kid's changing attention and level of motivation.