Steph Carter

University of York

Steph is a York graduate in psycholinguistics with years of experience in language teaching. They specialise in second language learning, human-computer interaction and gamification. Outside of their project, their research interests extend to accessibility in games, game design for children and young people and esport analytics.  

Gamification and the role of games have been embraced in education, particularly in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). A large amount of SLA research is informed by psycholinguistics findings when researching a person’s second language (L2). However, there is little research on the potential impact of gamifying psycholinguistic experimental design. In addition, while player and learner engagement is well understood in second language learning and teaching, participant interest and engagement are highly controlled in psycholinguistic experiments to avoid confounding variables in the data. This not only limits the application of conclusions in real-world contexts, but also contributes to larger participant drop-offs in studies. It also fails to account for participant disengagement as a confound. 

This project investigates various game design elements and their interaction with participant engagement, behaviour and theoretical findings for psycholinguistic approaches to SLA. The findings can then be used to inform the design and development of psycholinguistic data collection tools with further benefits to cognitive research and language game development in the industry.