UK study suggests games contribute to dearth in vocabulary

Teenagers have only half the vocabulary of adults (12,600 vs. 21,400), an issue that can be partially attributed to too much gaming, according to research conducted by Lancaster University's Professor Tony McEnery.

As it is presented in the BBC report (we don't have a copy of the research to verify our critiques), there are some obvious issues with how McEnery reached his conclusions. Since his comparison was between teenagers and adults between the ages of 25 to 34. Within that time, many students attend college courses and / or interact outside of a small group of school students, and such time to interact is what McEnery himself suggests increases vocabulary. The lack of a control group in his studies means that most of the correlations he makes have little merit to support them. Perhaps a cross-generational study of similarly-aged groups would be more fitting?

What irks us about the study is his conclusion that the problems can be contributed to "technology isolation syndrome," an issue purported to be caused by an "overuse of technologies such as computer games and MP3 players" (quotation attributed to BBC, although presented as a rephrasing of McEnery's words). Online games are interaction. McEnery believes that "kids need to get talking and develop their vocabulary." Sure, Mario doesn't have any five-dollar terminology, but neither do Go or Spider Solitaire. And reading isn't exactly social, either. Might there be other, non-vocabulary skills learned in gaming (reaction time, multitasking, etc.) also beneficial to work? It just feels too much like a scapegoat excuse.

McEnery's study came from observations of blogs, questionnaires, and speech. He does opine that the educational system needs improvement to counteract the problem, and we agree that teenagers optimally would equal or come close to their predecessors at a younger age, so that they might one day surpass them. As for us, we learned most of our lexicon from text-based adventure games. So if you excuse us, we have to walk north, look kitchen, look counter, take sandwich, inventory, eat sandwich.

[Via Game Politics]

Tags: research, study

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