Effects of Pitch Gestures on Learning Chinese Orthography with a Social Robot

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the effect of a social robot using head and arm gestures mimicking the lexical tones (i.e. pitch gestures) on learning pronunciations and translations of Chinese characters. Performance was compared between two within-subjects conditions: Gesture Observation condition, in which the robot used pitch gestures to teach six characters and the No Gesture condition in which the robot did not use gestures to teach six characters. Participants (N = 21) were tested on how well they pronounced and translated the learned characters. The study showed that a robot not using gestures was found to enhance learning, but only when participants could first familiarize with learning Chinese characters with the robot using pitch gestures. These results suggested that prior knowledge of learning Chinese attained from a robot using pitch gestures improved recall on learning the characters during a learning module with a robot not using gestures.