Design Patterns of Technology-based Therapeutic Activities for Children with Language Impairments: A Psycholinguistic-Driven Approach

In the last years, researchers and therapists have pinpointed a number of critical aspects in current speech-language interventions. Several studies have explored the use of technology to overcome these barriers and to support speech-therapy in children with language impairments (e.g. DLD and ASD). In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for designing linguistic activities (for assessment and training), based on advances in psycholinguistics. Moving from this theoretical framework, we identified a development process - from the UX design to coding of activities - which is based on a novel set of Design Patterns at multiple layers of abstraction. We then put this framework into practice by implementing these patterns into two technological solutions - tablet and robots - and performing an empirical study to evaluate their benefits. Our results, although still preliminary since they assessed only a tablet experimental condition, are promising for extending the identified Design Patterns to other technological solutions.