LINKX for language

My son Charlie learned his first words while sitting at a blue Little Tykes table with his first ABA therapists. At first we used simple objects—-a ball and a shoe—to teach him words, and then moved onto flashcards—of objects, places, people, letters, numbers and (some 7 1/2 years later), words.

The problem with flashcards (and, if you like, with teaching language at a table) is that a child learns to identify certain words on the flashcards, but not necessarily to transfer that learning to the real world. A child might, for instance, learn to identify several photographs and drawings of a “dog” and then not call the four-legged creature on the sidewalk “dog.”

A new toy called LINKX aims to address this problem. Developed by Helma van Rijn, a student at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, LINKX is a toy that aims to help a child learn the words for objects in the environment via “speech-o-grams.” From van Rijn’s website (with thanks to a February 27th post on Medgadget):

Parents record words inside [the speech-o-grams] and attach them to objects before play starts.

Children can link blocks to these speech-o-gram. Each link results in lights that go on and a sound that is played. The sound moves into the block. You can link blocks and speech-o-grams over and over and this will eventually make them remember the word.

You can also link blocks together. When one block owns a sound, it will move to the other block. Again doing this again and again will stimulate language learning.

Go here to read more on van Rijn’s project page and also to see a movie. And this is a press release from Delft University of Technology. Van Rijn has tested LINKX with 3-5 year old autistic children who, it seems, “…. do indeed learn new words, although it is still too early to arrive at any definitive conclusions about the long-term effects of the toy.”

More creative ways to help children learn language sounds like a good thing to me.