Children’s oral language skills in preschool can predict their success in reading, writing, and academics in later schooling.
Helping children improve their language skills early on could lead to more children succeeding later. As such, we examined the potential of a sociable robotic learning/teaching companion to support children’s early language development.
In a microgenetic study, 17 children played a storytelling game with the robot eight times over a two-month period. We evaluated whether a robot that “leveled” its stories to match the child’s current abilities would lead to greater learning and language improvements than a robot that was not matched. All children learned new words, created stories, and enjoyed playing. Children who played with a matched robot used more words, and more diverse words, in their stories than unmatched children. Understanding the interplay between the robot’s and the children’s language will inform future work on robot companions that support children’s education through play.
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WESTLUND, Jacqueline Kory and BREAZEAL, Cynthia, 2015. The Interplay of Robot Language Level with Children’s Language Learning during Storytelling. In: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction Extended Abstracts. Online. Portland Oregon USA: ACM. 2 March 2015. p. 65–66. ISBN 978-1-4503-3318-4. DOI 10.1145/2701973.2701989. [Accessed 30 November 2023].
HERMANN, Isabella, 2023. Artificial intelligence in fiction: between narratives and metaphors. AI & SOCIETY. Online. 1 February 2023. Vol. 38, no. 1, p. 319–329. DOI 10.1007/s00146-021-01299-6. [Accessed 30 November 2023]. Science-fiction (SF) has become a reference point in the discourse on the ethics and risks surrounding artificial intelligence (AI). Thus, AI in SF—science-fictional AI—is considered part of a larger corpus of ‘AI narratives’ that are analysed as shaping the fears and hopes of the technology. SF, however, is not a foresight or technology assessment, but tells dramas for a human audience. To make the drama work, AI is often portrayed as human-like or autonomous, regardless of the actual technological limitations. Taking science-fictional AI too literally, and even applying it to science communication, paints a distorted image of the technology’s current potential and distracts from the real-world implications and risks of AI. These risks are not about humanoid robots or conscious machines, but about the scoring, nudging, discrimination, exploitation, and surveillance of humans by AI technologies through governments and corporations. AI in SF, on the other hand, is a trope as part of a genre-specific mega-text that is better understood as a dramatic means and metaphor to reflect on the human condition and socio-political issues beyond technology.