Using Online Word Games to Study Language Comprehension Skills across the Lifespan

使用语言交流的能力是人类的一项核心能力，它为社会、教育和职业方面的社会提供了基础。语言使我们能够迅速地将思想从演讲者/作者的头脑传递到听众/读者的头脑中。众所周知，语言理解能力差的儿童和成年人在一生中无论是在学业成就还是职业地位方面都处于不利地位。因此，至关重要的是，我们必须了解为什么、如何以及何时在语言理解方面出现个体差异，以便制定更有效的学校干预措施并改善儿童的结果，否则他们可能难以理解复杂的语言和书面语言。这个项目将使用基于网络的语言游戏来探索语言理解技能是如何在一生中发展起来的。游戏的主要特点我们将开发创新的基于网络的实验工具，以评估个人处理语言各方面的能力。这些任务将是有趣和引人入胜的。通过将这些任务描述为“游戏”，并确保游戏中适当的奖励/反馈机制(例如，收集令牌和解锁成就)，我们将有可能从比传统基于实验室的方法通常可能的更多的参与者和更多样化的人群中收集数据。游戏大纲整个语言游戏将包括单独的迷你游戏，每个游戏将评估个人在上述特定认知部分的技能。通过将这些迷你游戏合并到一个整体游戏中，并确保每个迷你游戏必须以最大的奖励(代币和成就)完成，我们希望从大量的个人那里获得关于所有四个迷你游戏的数据。我们的目标是招募1000名“完整”的参与者，但希望社交媒体的报道能让我们大大超过这一目标。每款迷你游戏都将单独试行，在推出游戏的最终版本之前，会将性能与更传统的语言评估进行比较。虽然迷你游戏的细节将由学生与他们的学术导师和大锅合作开发，但我们在这里概述了一项可能的任务，可以用来衡量词汇质量(即词汇知识)。参与者将看到一个目标单词(例如，Happy)，后面跟着一系列可能出现在随机位置的匹配。参与者的游戏是在目标词从屏幕上消失之前，尽可能快地选择与目标词在含义上接近的任何词(例如，高兴、高兴)。这些单词将随机出现持续时间，随着参与者表现更好，平均持续时间会在不同区块减少。在一些试验中，匹配将使用该单词最频繁的含义/含义，而在另一些试验中，参与者将必须找到具有歧义且相关含义不是最频繁的单词的匹配(例如，bank-shore)。通过系统地改变词频和词义的相对频率，我们可以获得两个测量：(I)词汇深度：高分反映了相对较少的词的良好基础知识(Ii)词汇获取的灵活性：高分反映提取词的上下文相关意义的能力随后将开发其他游戏来测量句子理解(将句子与适当的图片匹配)、工作记忆(回忆与其他具有挑战性的谜题交织的单词/符号)和执行控制(例如Stroop)。摘要这个项目将通过揭示个体在关键认知功能上的差异模式以及这些差异在一生中如何变化，来帮助我们理解支持语言理解的认知机制

The ability to communicate using language is a core human ability that provides the foundation for social, educational and professional aspects of society. Language allows us to rapidly transfer ideas from the mind of the speaker/writer to the mind of the listener/reader. Children and adults with poor language comprehension skills are known to be disadvantaged throughout their lives, in terms of both academic attainment and occupational status. It is therefore vital that we understand why, how and when individual differences in language comprehension arise in order to develop more effective school-based interventions and improve outcomes for children who may otherwise struggle to understand complex spoken and written language. This project will use web-based language games to explore how language comprehension skills develop across the lifespan.. Key Characteristics of the GamesWe will develop innovative web-based experimental tools for assessing individuals' abilities to process various aspects of language. These tasks will be fun and engaging. By characterising these tasks as 'games' and ensuring the suitable reward/feedback mechanisms within the game (e.g., collecting tokens and unlocking achievements) we will make it possible to collect data from far more participants and from more diverse populations than is usually possible with conventional lab-based approachesOutline of GamesThe overall language game will comprise separate mini-games that will each assess an individuals' skill at the specific cognitive components mentioned above. By combining these mini-games into an overall game and ensuring that each of the mini-games must be completed for maximum reward (tokens and achievements) we hope to obtain data from significant number of individuals on all four mini-games. We aim to recruit a total of 1000 'complete' participants but hope that social media coverage may allow us to substantially exceed this target. Each mini game will be piloted separately with performance being compared to more conventional language assessments prior to rolling out the final version of the game. While the details of the Mini Games will be developed by the student in collaboration with both their academic supervisors and Cauldron, we outline here a possible task that could be used to provide measures of lexical quality (i.e. vocabulary knowledge).Participants will see a single target word (e.g., HAPPY) followed by a string of possible matches that occur in random locations. The participants game is to select as quickly as possible any word that are a close match in meaning with the target word before they disappear from the screen (e.g., DELIGHTED, CHEERFUL). These words will appear for random durations, with mean duration reducing across blocks as participants perform better. On some trials the matches will use the most frequent meaning/sense of the word, while on others the participant will have to find matches with words that are ambiguous and where the relevant meaning is NOT the most frequent (e.g., BANK - SHORE). By systematically varying both the frequency of the words and the relative frequencies of the word meanings, we can obtain both measure of:(i) Vocabulary depth: A high score reflects good basic knowledge of relatively rare words(ii) Flexibility in vocabulary access: A high score reflects the ability to extract the contextually relevant meaning of wordsOther games will then be developed to measure sentence comprehension (matching sentences with appropriate pictures), working memory (recalling words/symbols that are interleaved with other challenging puzzles) and executive control (e.g., Stroop). SummaryThis project will contribute to our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that support language comprehension by revealing patterns of individual differences in key cognitive functions and how these vary across the lifespan