Social/dialogical roles of social robots in supporting children’s learning of language and literacy—A review and analysis of innovative roles

Abstract

One of the many purposes for which social robots are designed is education, and there have been many attempts to systematize their potential in this field. What these attempts have in common is the recognition that learning can be supported in a variety of ways because a learner can be engaged in different activities that foster learning. Up to now, three roles have been proposed when designing these activities for robots: as a teacher or tutor, a learning peer, or a novice. Current research proposes that deciding in favor of one role over another depends on the content or preferred pedagogical form. However, the design of activities changes not only the content of learning, but also the nature of a human–robot social relationship. This is particularly important in language acquisition, which has been recognized as a social endeavor. The following review aims to specify the differences in human–robot social relationships when children learn language through interacting with a social robot. After proposing categories for comparing these different relationships, we review established and more specific, innovative roles that a robot can play in language-learning scenarios. This follows Mead’s (1946) theoretical approach proposing that social roles are performed in interactive acts. These acts are crucial for learning, because not only can they shape the social environment of learning but also engage the learner to different degrees. We specify the degree of engagement by referring to Chi’s (2009) progression of learning activities that range from active, constructive, toward interactive with the latter fostering deeper learning. Taken together, this approach enables us to compare and evaluate different human–robot social relationships that arise when applying a robot in a particular social role.

Lessons in Developing a Behavioral Coding Protocol to Analyze In-the-Wild Child–Robot Interaction Events and Experiments

“…Unlike Japanese, English is a language where pronouns are frequently necessary, which provides more opportunity to assess if the robot is being spoken of as an object, or if it is being gendered and how. There are many other approaches that could be explored, including the impacts of the robot's language on the children's use of language and imitation behaviors [35][36][37][38], as well as cases when the children cannot understand the robot's accent or vice versa [10]. While this approach to analysis is not the ideal for all group CRI in-the-wild analyses, such as those where there are better video data and clear one-to-one interactions with the robot, or in which individuals can be differentiated from one another [31,39], we believe it could be useful particularly in those cases where language is already a point of focus [3,6,10].…”

Understanding Children's Multimodal Conversational Development: Challenges and Opportunities

“…The fruit of this effort will be highly impactful to many other domains of cognitive development, the most direct being language learning [7,27,26] but also the acquisition of new knowledge more generally [9,4,14]. Further, adopting Machine Learning tools to model child coordination would help translate our accumulated scientific understanding relatively easily into improvement in child-oriented AI [19,33], thus bridging theory and practice.…”

Perceptions of intelligence & sentience shape children’s interactions with robot reading companions

“…The authors suggest that social robots can support reading in several ways, including by simulating social interactions that promote comprehension and opportunities for ‘connection-making’, as well as by modelling effective reading habits. However, as we explore in a recent review, social robots might also be particularly useful in supporting reading in children who experience reading difficulty – and associated reading anxiety – by providing a social context for reading that is both engaging and unintimidating 15 .…”