The Effects on Children’s Writing of Adding Speech Synthesis to a Word Processor

Abstract

Synthesized speech was added to a word processor used by students in Grades 2 and 5. Each subject wrote four stories on a microcomputer and received spoken feedback from a speech synthesizer while writing two of these stories. It was hypothesized that stories produced in the spoken feedback condition would be longer, would be edited more, and would be of higher quality than those written without spoken feedback. It was also hypothesized that spoken feedback would be related to increased motivation and audience awareness. Results indicated that children did more editing and preferred to write using the spoken condition. Suggestions for future research efforts and classroom applications of a “talking” computer are offered.