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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.
No, we won't help you with your homework.
Sig: I stole this sig.
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
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!
"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.