Adaptive Vocabulary Learning Environment for Late Talkers

Abstract

The main aim of this research is to provide children who have an early language delay with an adaptive way to train their vocabulary taking into account individuality of the learner. The suggested system is a mobile game-based learning environment which provides simple tasks where the learner chooses a picture that corresponds to a played back sound from multiple pictures presented on the screen. Our basic assumption is that the more similar the concepts (in our case, words) are, the harder the recognition task is. The system chooses the pictures to be presented on the screen by calculating the distances between the concepts in different dimensions. The distances are considered to consist of semantic, visual and auditory similarities. Each similarity factor can be measured with different methods. According to the user’s feedback, the weights of the factors and similarity distance are adjusted to modify the level of difficulty in further iterations. The system is designed to attempt to retrieve knowledge about the learners by recognition of aspects that are difficult for them. Proposed solution could be considered as a self-adaptive system, which is trying to recognize individual model of the learner and apply it for further facilitation of his/her learning process. The use of the system will be demonstrated in future work.