Today's children grow up in an environment that is increasingly characterized by digital voice assistants (DVAs), such as Alexa, Siri, or the Google Assistant. This paper argues that any attempt to investigate children's interactions with, and perceptions of, DVAs should be based on the theoretical grounds of an ontological framework that considers children's genuine understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to be a machine. Based on focus groups and a gamified data collection design, our empirical inquiry applied qualitative methods to explore primary school children's (n = 27, age range: 6-10 years, average age: 8.6 years) open interactions with DVAs. In particular, our focus was on how DVAs were embedded in children's general ontological belief system, and how children interpreted certain aspects of DVAs' interactive capabilities as being genuinely humanoid or non-humanoid. On the one hand, our findings suggest that children's interactions with DVAs might be more an end in itself than a means to an end, meaning that children primarily interact with DVAs for the sake of engaging excitement instead of using the devices' utilitarian functionalities. On the other hand, we found that children in our sample held firm ontological beliefs about the distinct nature of humans and machines, whilst interpreting certain aspects of DVAs' interactive capabilities as being genuinely humanoid (e.g., non-responsiveness, delayed responses, inaccuracy) and non-humanoid (e.g., permanent responsiveness, promptness, accuracy, limited conversational capacities, lack of common sense, standardized responses) at the same time.

Abstract‘Anthropomorphism’ is a popular term in the literature on human-technology engagements, in general, and child-technology engagements, in particular. But what does it really mean to ‘anthropomorphize’ something in today’s world? This conceptual review article, addressed to researchers interested in anthropomorphism and adjacent areas, reviews contemporary anthropomorphism research, and it offers a critical perspective on how anthropomorphism research relates to today’s children who grow up amid increasingly intelligent and omnipresent technologies, particularly digital voice assistants (e.g., Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri). First, the article reviews a comprehensive body of quantitative as well as qualitative anthropomorphism research and considers it within three different research perspectives: descriptive, normative and explanatory. Following a brief excursus on philosophical pragmatism, the article then discusses each research perspective from a pragmatistic viewpoint, with a special emphasis on child-technology and child-voice-assistant engagements, and it also challenges some popular notions in the literature. These notions include descriptive ‘as if’ parallels (e.g., child behaves ‘as if’ Alexa was a friend), or normative assumptions that human-human engagements are generally superior to human-technology engagements. Instead, the article reviews different examples from the literature suggesting the nature of anthropomorphism may change as humans’ experiential understandings of humanness change, and this may particularly apply to today’s children as their social cognition develops in interaction with technological entities which are increasingly characterized by unprecedented combinations of human and non-human qualities.

Digital Voice Assistants (DVAs) have become a ubiquitous technology in today’s home and childhood environments. Inspired by (Bernstein and Crowley, J Learn Sci 17:225–247, 2008) original study (n = 60, age 4–7 years) on how children’s ontological conceptualizations of life and technology were systematically associated with their real-world exposure to robotic entities, the current study explored this association for children in their middle childhood (n = 143, age 7–11 years) and with different levels of DVA-exposure. We analyzed correlational survey data from 143 parent–child dyads who were recruited on ‘Amazon Mechanical Turk’ (MTurk). Children’s ontological conceptualization patterns of life and technology were measured by asking them to conceptualize nine prototypical organically living and technological entities (e.g., humans, cats, smartphones, DVAs) with respect to their biology, intelligence, and psychology. Their ontological conceptualization patterns were then associated with their DVA-exposure and additional control variables (e.g., children’s technological affinity, demographic/individual characteristics). Compared to biology and psychology, intelligence was a less differentiating factor for children to differentiate between organically living and technological entities. This differentiation pattern became more pronounced with technological affinity. There was some evidence that children with higher DVA-exposure differentiated more rigorously between organically living and technological entities on the basis of psychology. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study exploring children’s real-world exposure to DVAs and how it is associated with their conceptual understandings of life and technology. Findings suggest although psychological conceptualizations of technology may become more pronounced with DVA-exposure, it is far from clear such tendencies blur ontological boundaries between life and technology from children’s perspective.

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