Robot Voice Research Articles

Quality of Writing by Elementary Students With Learning Disabilities

AbstractTeaching students with learning disabilities to write often presents great challenges. In this article, we describe studies of a HyperCard stack that was developed over a four-year period to assist beginning writers and their teachers. Students enter words from a keyboard or by selecting from prepared lists (a 1,000 word core list; four teacher-generated lists; a first names list; and a user-generated, private list). All text can be spoken using a speech synthesis system (robotic voice). Records of students’ writing are created automatically. Student’s “certificates” with writing samples and pictures, together with teacher feedback, may be printed. ROBO-Writer was compared with paper-and-pencil writing and a commonly used word processing application for groups of students with learning disabilities at two school sites. Using four rating criteria, texts created by students with learning disabilities who used ROBO-Writer showed significantly higher scores than did those of matched students using oth...