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

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 Games
We 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 approaches

Outline of Games
The 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 words
Other 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).


Summary
This 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