ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 5, 1996 TAG: 9601050066
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
Computer games that produce sounds, flying cows and circus clowns help children overcome dyslexia and other language difficulties by training their minds to capture the lightning-fast sounds of normal speech, experts say.
The games, developed by the University of California, San Francisco, and tested at Rutgers University, use computer-generated speech that has slowed the consonant sounds that usually trip across the tongue within microseconds, far faster than some children can understand.
Contests within the games force language-disabled children to concentrate on sounds such as ``da'' and ``pa'' and this, in turn, attunes the brain to grasp the subtle differences. As the children improve, the games automatically speed up until the troublesome sounds are clipping along at near normal speed.
Training for just a month enabled a group of children to advance their speech recognition by two years, and later tests showed this skill helped when they started learning to read, said Steve Miller, a researcher at Rutgers University.
Two studies on the technique are to be published today in the journal Science.
Children are lured to the games by colorful animation, animals that fly, silly characters and contests that reward success, Miller said.
In a farm game, for instance, children are told ``your job is to catch the cow,'' and a comical bovine starts flying around the barnyard.
As it flies, the computer produces a series of sounds that will change suddenly and unexpectedly. The child releases a button to indicate the change has been heard.
A child playing the game hears ``pack, pack, pack, pat,'' for example. At the sound of the last word, the child reacts.
``If he is quick enough, he gets a point and the cow runs into a barn,'' Miller said. ``If it's a miss, the cow keeps flying around.''
After three correct tries, the change in sound become slightly harder to detect.
The games, in effect, focus sound for the language-learning impaired children, in the same way that glasses refocus light. Miller and his co-authors said the games may actually teach the brain to process subtle sounds that previously were not captured.
``The computer alters speech in such a way that the `fast' sounds explode out of the stream of speech,'' Michael M. Merzenich, a UCSF researcher and a lead author in the study, said in a statement. ``To the average person, this altered speech sounds distorted, but ... it enables children with [language-learning disability] to more accurately comprehend the phonics within speech.''
About 7 million American children have been diagnosed as having language-learning deficits. Research has suggested that the difficulties stem from an abnormal brain-network architecture that can affect speech and verbal understanding in young children and also can cause dyslexia, a type of reading disability, in school-age children. Language-learning disability costs society about $7.5 billion annually in remedial training and other expenses, the researchers said.
In one study reported in Science, children ages 5 to 10 who lagged in language development by two to three years were put through four weeks of daily sessions with the programs. All but one of the seven children in the study improved to near normal or above.
Another study matched two groups of 11 children. One group trained with the full computer game, and the other used games without the altered speech. Both groups improved, Miller said, but, in the group with full training, all but one of the 11 advanced by about two years.
William M. Jenkins, a UCSF researcher, said it is clear ``there is no defect in the fundamental learning machinery in the brain'' of most of the language-impaired children. This means, he said, that the difficulties can be overcome with training.
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