Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (Peeters, 2019)

David Peeters states that virtual reality can be a gateway to assist in the change of language sciences. Traditionally, research has been tried but as an experimental control, at the cost of ecological validity. Language is often acquired and studied in a static lab environment using specific words and sentences on computers. This methodology is often far removed from the real nature of communication.

Peeters questions the ideology that ecological validity and experiments consist on a single state. Instead, he proposes that orthogonal factors using VR allows researchers to achieve high control and ecological validity simultaneously. In the environments, certain participants no longer are passive observers but become active participants utilizing communicative contexts. The thinking is that VR removes this artificial divide between the participants and stimulus.

The research paper shows that well-established psycholinguistic findings can  replicate reliably in VR settings. Up and beyond this VR enables experiments that would be impractical or not possible in real life, for example, programming virtual agents to manipulate speech rates, pitch, smiling and perfect consistency provide an environment that increases reproducibility and experimental precision. 

Also, VR shifts the traditional focus and allows multimodal communication that utilize the following features: speech, gesture, eye gaze, facial expression, and environmental context. The results show that language processing in context can differ from traditional lab results, this shows that earlier studies have shown that the brain can do rather than what it will do in everyday interaction.

There are limitations for example, human-agent dialogue, technical tracking challenges and ethical issues with children. The plus side is that VR is affordable and technically and feasible for research labs.

The conclusion and thinking of Peeters is that VR has the potential to fundamentally reshape language learning by aligning with the complexity of real world communication.