The Digital Playground: Kindergarten Children Learning Sign Language Through Multimedia

The article discusses a study of 4-5 year old children’s use of technology to assist and enhance the acquisition of a play lexicon within a formal educational setting. The new language system to be learned was Auslan, a signed/ nonverbal language. A purpose specific software program was developed by the authors, “Auslan Kids,” in order to test and evaluate the efficacy of multimedia in learning language particularized by visual representation. Of particular interest to the authors was the influence of characters and interaction styles on learning outcomes. Kindergarten children managed to learn Australian Sign Language vocabulary from the multimedia software package. Children that interacted with the software either by making the signs or by making selections with the mouse learned more signs that those who were passive and only watched. Children showed a slight preference for learning from a female over a superhero or puppet.