Teaching Literacy Skills to French Minimally Verbal School-Aged Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders with the Serious Game SEMA-TIC: An Exploratory Study.
A 23-week French computer game turned one in four minimally verbal autistic children into real readers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
McIntyre et al. (2017) tested a French computer game called SEMA-TIC. The game teaches reading to minimally verbal school kids with autism.
Twelve children played the game for 23 weeks. A control group got no extra reading work.
What they found
The game group made big gains on every reading test. Three of the twelve kids learned to read real words.
That is 25 percent of the hardest-to-teach readers moving into basic literacy.
How this fits with other research
May (2011) reviewed nine older studies. All used flash cards, not games, yet also taught word naming to minimally verbal kids. SEMA-TIC shows the same skill can now be taught with a tablet.
Vargas (2013) used adapted story books. Kids loved the props but only gained story sense, not decoding. SEMA-TIC goes a step further by turning printed words into the game targets.
Tonnsen et al. (2016) tried a computer program too, but focused on picture-rich reading comprehension. SEMA-TIC is the first to show that a game alone can teach the nuts-and-bolts skill of sounding out words.
Why it matters
If you serve minimally verbal school-aged clients, SEMA-TIC gives you a ready-made 23-week protocol that produced readers without any tabletop drills. Pair the game with your usual reinforcement and you may see the same jump from non-reader to decoder.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Learning to read is very challenging for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), but also very important, as it can give them access to new knowledge. This is even more challenging in minimally verbal children, who do not have the verbal abilities to learn through usual methods. To address the learning of literacy skills in French minimally verbal school-aged children with ASD, we designed the serious game SEMA-TIC, which relies on non-verbal cognitive skills and uses specific learning strategies adapted to the features of autistic individuals. This study investigated the usability of SEMA-TIC (in terms of adaptability, efficiency, and effectiveness) for the acquisition of literacy skills in French minimally verbal school-aged children with ASD. Twenty-five children with ASD and no functional language participated in the study. Children in the training group received the SEMA-TIC training over 23 weeks (on average), while no intervention was provided to children in the non-training group. Results indicated that SEMA-TIC presents a suitable usability, as all participants were able to play (adaptability), to complete the training (efficiency) and to acquire significant literacy skills (effectiveness). Indeed, the literacy skills in the training group significantly improved after the training, as measured by specific experimental tasks (alphabet knowledge, word reading, word-non-word discrimination, sentence reading and word segmentation; all <i>p</i> ≤ 0.001) compared to the non-training group. More importantly, 3 out of 12 children of the training group could be considered as word decoders at the end of the intervention, whereas no children of the non-training group became able to decode words efficiently. The present study thus brings preliminary evidence that French minimally verbal school-aged children with ASD are able to learn literacy skills through SEMA-TIC, a specific computerized intervention consisting in a serious game based on non-verbal cognitive skills.
, 2017 · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01523