In a study in schools in Hackney, London, 22 native Turkish-speaking four- and five-year-olds were assessed for emotion-recognition and empathy by playing the Happy Cats computer game, developed by Screen Learningto support teachers with Foundation Stage Profile assessments.
Each child was randomly assigned to play the game first in Turkish or English, or vice-versa, to ensure the order the tests were played in did not influence the results.
Changing the game's language from Turkish to English lowered a child's score by 20 percentage points on average.
Dr Ian Walker, a cognitive psychologist at Screen Learning who devised the study, said, 'Children do quite strikingly better when they play the game in their native language. They are at a disadvantage when they are tested in English. It is fairly clear that in non-language tests this is not an accurate measure of their abilities.'
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