The Effect of Avatar Technology on Sign Writing Vocabularies Acquisition for Deaf Learners

Abstract

The increasing interest in 3D virtual human avatars has led to an expansion in the scale of their applications. One of the most significant uses of such technology is providing appropriate educational services for deaf and hearing impaired learners who experience immense difficulties in acquiring literacy skills in spoken languages. In fact, a great deal of effort has been devoted to create animated characters for rendering stories, poems, scientific terms, or any written text into signed languages (SLs). In this paper, we aim to investigate the effect of integrating a 3D signing avatar in an educational game and examine how such technology can boost the learning experience of deaf gamers. Particularly, we will seek, through a pilot study, to investigate whether the use of a signing avatar has a positive effect on the acquisition of SignWriting notation, a written form of SL, for those learners.