To help the speech-language pathologist: NSU specialists went to kindergarten

Speech therapists of the kindergarten No. 97 have already been cooperating with Novosibirsk State University for three years. New programs that will help children with speech impairments are being developed at NSU Section of Fundamental and Applied Linguistics.

Kindergarten № 97. Monday morning. In the speech therapist's office, one can see the fuss around six-year-old Egor:

"Now we'll put special glasses on you. Super-glasses! Is it convenient for you? Look on the screen, please. Well done, and now look ..." Egor is interested in glasses, while adults (speech therapist Ekaterina Glazyrina and students of Novosibirsk State University) are interested in Egor's reaction. All of this is the part of work to develop a modern speech therapy diagnostic program or a mobile application that will allow to speed up the testing of children. However, it is better to tell the story in the chronological order.

ASD-tablet

The NSU Section of Fundamental and Applied Linguistics is engaged in the development of electronic expanded programs designed to help children with speech impairments. The collaboration of the section and the speech therapy room of the kindergarten No. 97 began two years ago with the development of the mobile application for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

A lot of people still believe that the main concern of a speech therapist in a kindergarten is to train the correct pronunciation of sounds. Training children to pronounce "difficult" sounds is the least of the problems that specialists face.

"Especially after the Concept of the inclusive education development has been adopted in the Novosibirsk region. This concept refers to the right to high-quality and affordable education for children with disabilities", says Elena Gichkina, head of kindergarten No. 97 "Fairy Tale".

Children with disabilities are children who have various abnormalities in their mental or physical development that lead to abnormalities in overall development preventing children fr om living a full life.

According to the head such children require special attention as well as approaches. This applies not only to kindergarteners.

"The cause of speech pathologies in children with disabilities are organic lesions of the central nervous system, resulting fr om the impact of various adverse factors on the developing brain of the child during the intrauterine and early development periods. At the same time, the children intellect is preserved", says the speech therapist of the kindergarten № 97 Ekaterina Glazyrina.

"In our kindergarten there are children with alalia (gross underdevelopment or total absence of speech), that is one of the most serious speech defects, in which a child is practically deprived of the language of communication. There are children with dysarthria (the so-called "vague speech"), echololia when a child is like an echo repeating every phrase said, and children with autism spectrum disorders".

The difficulty when working with children with disabilities is that they are reluctant, show difficulty or even refuse to contact - to talk.

"We together with the member of teaching staff from NSU Section of Fundamental and Applied Linguistics Anna Leman and the student Maria Sterekhova took as the basic principle the method of pictograms. With their help, a non-speaking child or child, for whom it is difficult to participate in social contacts, puts forward proposals and thus expresses his needs or desires. In practice, it looks like using paper cards with pictures, with the help of which a child can show: I want an apple, I'll go clean my teeth, etc. We can say that we transferred this method to an electronic medium, we developed a program designed for use on tablets and mobile phones", says Lyudmila Mozheikina, the associate professor at NSU Section of Fundamental and Applied Linguistics, the project manager for the development of electronic programs for special needs.

The change of paper medium to electronic one is not just a tribute to fashion. For children who refuse to contact with other people, the program on the tablet acts as an intermediary. A child may not see a person, does not look into the face of the interlocutor, can be even in another room and still communicate. It should be noted that the rules of composing pictograms into phrases and simple sentences are based on the basic rules of the Russian language grammar. Thus, by composing pictograms, a child develops the skills of coherent speech.

In the kindergarten No. 97, the idea to use tablets was met positively. Firstly, the speech therapist always has the right to choose: he can use paper medium or electronic one. Secondly, it is very important that a child him/herself wants to speak. Experts literally try to use any opportunity to awaken this desire.

"Motivation is the most difficult task. Once a child has an incentive to speak, you can do a lot for him/her! I try to use all possible and available means. A tablet or a mobile phone can become one of attractive forms that will interest a child and push him/her towards us", says speech therapist Ekaterina Glazyrina.

The program, developed for children with autism spectrum disorders, was placed on the Internet in free access. It was tested by 30 Russian families, leaving positive reviews. The Novosibirsk State University specialists went further. Diagnostics became a new research direction. A year of working together with speech therapists led NSU specialists to an idea to develop a mobile application that will speed up the testing process for children.

Diagnostic Game

Pencil, bright colorful pictures and sheets of paper with questions. To show in the pictures a mouse and a bear, a duck and a fishing pole (children with general speech underdevelopment can confuse these words), choose wh ere a kitten hid under the bed, and wh ere on the bed ("logopedic" children have problems with spatial orientation). Assignments to understand words, phrases and simple sentences ... All problems have to be identified now, otherwise at school a child will have difficulties in written speech.

The performance of each task is scored in points. They need to be calculated according to certain formulas, converted into large tables and only then interpreted. It should be done twice a year. This is today the way to test all children in kindergarten. Based on such diagnosis the speech therapist draws a conclusion about presence or absence of problems in a child and develops an individual work plan for each child. In this case, one should not forget that such testing should look like an interesting game for a child, and children are impatient. If children get bored, they begin laughing and playing together instead of doing tasks.

"Diagnosis of a speech therapy children group can take up to three weeks. It is very long. We, speech therapists, could have spent this time helping a child, says Ekaterina Glazyrina. t task. Once a child has an incentive to speak, you can do a lot for him/her! I try to use all possible and available means. A tablet or a mobile phone can become one of attractive forms that will interest a child and push him/her towards us", says speech therapist Ekaterina Glazyrina.

"A modern speech therapist uses modern techniques, but he has to work as if in the XIXth century, says Lyudmila Mozheikina. - Therefore, we develop a special diagnostic program for him, in which the scoring algorithm has already been loaded. A speech therapist does not have to write numbers on paper, it would be enough to work with the child: give the tablet in his/her hands and correct the progress of completing tasks. Then just press the button and see the result. Imagine how much easier the work would be!"

Speech therapists, physiologists, psycholinguists, programmers and students of NSU Section of Fundamental and Applied Linguistics are involved into the project to develop a mobile application of the diagnostic program.

"Our students are not just programmers, because just programming is not enough. They know linguistics, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics and computer linguistics well. They can work on developing such programs, because they can picture (to the extent it is possible today) what happens at the levels of speech perception and production", explains Lyudmila Mozheikina.

"Last year in the kindergarten No. 97 our students were taught some speech therapy practices. Together with speech therapists, they were engaged in the diagnosis of children: they themselves experienced the specificity of each diagnostic task, assessing its performance and processing the results. This allowed us to create content, to develop the diagnostic program in the paper version that we are now implementing electronically", she goes on.

In general in the process of diagnosis, a child will not know whether he performs the tasks correctly. The program and the speech therapist will not tell him about that. However there are a few exceptions. The point is that it was decided to develop a program that will be both diagnostic and training.

"At some stages the program will give the "oh, wrong" signal in case of an incorrect answer and offer to repeat the task. For a child, it will be just like a game, an amusing diagnostic game on the tablet. However if you're wrong in the game and try again, it already becomes a developing moment. Here one can imagine different options, allowing in an exciting and friendly manner to report an error: an insufficient mistake, a little bit right choice, etc. It is very interesting which signal, picture or action on the screen to choose to do it", says Lyudmila Mozheikina.

Work on the mobile application is conducted in several directions at once. Now it is necessary to prove that logopaedic tasks on the tablet are more interesting for children than paper logopaedic tasks. For this purpose, NSU students studied at the Institute of Physiology and Fundamental Medicine and mastered the technology of data collection with the help of portable instrumental methodology, eye tracking. Special eye tracking glasses allow you to track the movement of eyes, fix the focus of attention and evaluate the specificity of perception. Such glasses students put on six-year-old Egor, the first child in the kindergarten, who took part in the testing.

"According to our hypothesis, children should be more interested in focusing their attention on mobile applications. Unlike assignments on paper, here a child will be able to move pictures on the tablet, sort them. Thus, the degree of involvement in the diagnostic process increases. We involve not only visualization, but also action, and through that we strengthen the work of the cerebral cortex and stimulate speech development, says Lyudmila Mozheikina.

As information on perceptions of various tasks is collected, the design of the program will be adjusted in a way that makes it the most interesting for children to spend time for a "diagnostic game". By the end of 2016 research with the help of eye tracking has been completed and it became possible to focus directly on the development of the mobile application.

In April-May 2017, we are going to test the program in kindergarten, providing diagnosis for children, and we will present the program for the evaluation by independent experts-speech therapists who did not take part in the work on the mobile application, says Lyudmila Mozheikina. She and her students are sure that already next year speech therapists will be able to use their development.

The final product is not planned for sale, the authors are going to share it through the Internet.