Typed versus spoken conversations in a multi-party epistemic game

Abstract

Multi-party chat is a standard feature of popular online games and is increasingly available in collaborative learning environments. This paper addresses the differences between spoken and typed conversations as high school students interacted with the epistemic game Urban Science. Coh-Metrix analyses showed that speech was associated with narrativity and cohesion whereas typed input was associated with syntactic simplicity and word concreteness. These findings suggest that the modality in group communication should be considered. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.