Introducing new nouns in a children's visual language

Abstract

Vedo-Vedi is an experimental visual language for multi-lingual electronic communication by 10-year-old children using the Internet. In this paper, we present a novel mechanism by which users can create new vocabulary items for the language. One of the challenges of providing such an extension mechanism for a visual language is making it easy to define new icons, even if the users are not comfortable with artistic drawing tools. In Vedo-Vedi, users can create new icons by selecting arbitrary rectangular regions from any of the more than 80 images used in the system.