Digital and pedagogical tools for the coordinated learning of LSF and French for deaf children – SignToKids

The SignToKids project aims to improve the inclusion of deaf children in the world of education with a focus on digital accessibility. More specifically, it focuses on the creation of the first digital and pedagogical tools to facilitate the coordinated learning of LSF and written French for deaf children between 7 and 12 years old. Thus, by using reasoning methods based on the spatial, geometrical or kinematic nature of LSF, these tools will offer alternative means to apprehend syntactic-semantic mechanisms of LSF, and then transform them into pedagogical tools. By working on their signed language skills, deaf children will have a more robust native language, making the transition to written French easier. The resulting digital assistance tools (web applications, serious games, or videobooks) will serve as a basis to test the skills acquired at different levels of the child's learning. They will promote the interactive manipulation of language concepts expressed in the form of textual representations (text in French, LSF-transcribed) or visual representations (images or animations of 3D signing avatars), and will integrate scenario-based exercises, such as choosing the right signed representation of a textual statement or vice versa, sequentially organizing language structures, or applying morphological or syntactic modifications to sentences. This project will also contribute to the advancement of research on automatic translation from text to signed movements, using recent symbolic and numerical AI techniques, and will transfer the knowledge acquired in LS computing to the realization of tools usable by deaf children. Practical experiments will be conducted to evaluate these innovative tools with deaf children in LSF-French bilingual schools.