Final Activity Report Summary - GRAPHOGAME (Training grapheme-phoneme correlations with a child-friendly computer game in preschool children with familial risk of dyslexia)
The objective of the European research project, GRAPHOGAME, is to investigate the effects of training with a child friendly computerised letter-sound correspondence game on alleviation and possible prevention of severe problems in reading and spelling acquisition at preschool age in several language contexts within Europe. The aim is that children actively train the important correspondences through an interesting game and learn through good representations of grapheme-phoneme correspondences on which they can form a solid foundation for their reading acquisition.
In the project we designed reading training games for four different languages namely English, Dutch, German and Finnish. The orthography of a language has an extensive influence on reading acquisition, and thus by including different types of orthographies into the research will ensure that the outcomes of the research will be possible to generalise.
Therefore, we included four different types of languages with varying depths of orthographies which form a balanced continuum: Finnish represents the shallowest orthography (i.e. letters are with one exception always pronounced in one and the same way), German the next most shallow, Dutch representing a deeper orthography and English the deepest orthography (one letter can represent many different speech sounds depending on the context in which it appears).
In our intervention studies we studied the effects of training with our reading game to the literacy skills of preschool as well as 1st graders. In particular the participants in our studies were those who had reading difficulties/dyslexia in their family (at least one of the family members had manifested dyslexia). We had two types of intervention designs: an intervention design which involved one intervention period or an intervention design in which there were two intervention periods one after another. In both types of intervention designs we tested the participants' reading related skills immediately before the intervention period (training with the computer game approximately 5 hours) as well as immediately after the intervention period. In addition, we also did a follow-up study by testing the participants' reading related skills after a year of the intervention. As a research method we used both behavioural and brain activity studies. As a summary of our main findings we can say that all in all behaviourally preschool aged children's letter knowledge seem to increase significantly during our Graphogame (reading game) training in all of the language contexts. We used a non-linguistic game (maths game) as a control game and as expected, there were no significant effects on letter-sound knowledge or reading skills after training with this game.
We also had participants who did not play the game but were pretested and post-tested, and the results show that when the players and non-players were compared we have evidence that training with our game has a significant effect on learning the basic reading skills.
Apart from letter knowledge skills, Finnish speaking children (aged 6.5 years on average) improved their reading skills (recognition of words). Similar tendencies were also evident from the German data with the same aged children (6.5 years). For the Dutch and English speaking groups, however, there were no direct training effects on reading words. However, we have still unanalysed data from our newest intervention study in which we used two different types of approaches for training the letter-speech sounds connections in English (phoneme vs. rime approaches). The preliminary look at the data indicates that also the English speaking children's reading skills improve after the training. The effects of training could be witnessed both from behavioural and brain data.
In the project we designed reading training games for four different languages namely English, Dutch, German and Finnish. The orthography of a language has an extensive influence on reading acquisition, and thus by including different types of orthographies into the research will ensure that the outcomes of the research will be possible to generalise.
Therefore, we included four different types of languages with varying depths of orthographies which form a balanced continuum: Finnish represents the shallowest orthography (i.e. letters are with one exception always pronounced in one and the same way), German the next most shallow, Dutch representing a deeper orthography and English the deepest orthography (one letter can represent many different speech sounds depending on the context in which it appears).
In our intervention studies we studied the effects of training with our reading game to the literacy skills of preschool as well as 1st graders. In particular the participants in our studies were those who had reading difficulties/dyslexia in their family (at least one of the family members had manifested dyslexia). We had two types of intervention designs: an intervention design which involved one intervention period or an intervention design in which there were two intervention periods one after another. In both types of intervention designs we tested the participants' reading related skills immediately before the intervention period (training with the computer game approximately 5 hours) as well as immediately after the intervention period. In addition, we also did a follow-up study by testing the participants' reading related skills after a year of the intervention. As a research method we used both behavioural and brain activity studies. As a summary of our main findings we can say that all in all behaviourally preschool aged children's letter knowledge seem to increase significantly during our Graphogame (reading game) training in all of the language contexts. We used a non-linguistic game (maths game) as a control game and as expected, there were no significant effects on letter-sound knowledge or reading skills after training with this game.
We also had participants who did not play the game but were pretested and post-tested, and the results show that when the players and non-players were compared we have evidence that training with our game has a significant effect on learning the basic reading skills.
Apart from letter knowledge skills, Finnish speaking children (aged 6.5 years on average) improved their reading skills (recognition of words). Similar tendencies were also evident from the German data with the same aged children (6.5 years). For the Dutch and English speaking groups, however, there were no direct training effects on reading words. However, we have still unanalysed data from our newest intervention study in which we used two different types of approaches for training the letter-speech sounds connections in English (phoneme vs. rime approaches). The preliminary look at the data indicates that also the English speaking children's reading skills improve after the training. The effects of training could be witnessed both from behavioural and brain data.