Who is that?! Does Changing the Robot as a Learning Companion Impact Preschoolers' Language Learning?

Abstract

In child-robot interaction research, many studies pursue the goal to support children's language development. While research in human-human interaction suggests that changing human partners during children's language learning can reduce their recall performance of the learning content, little is known whether a change in social robots as interaction partners influence children's learning in the same way. In this paper, we present findings from a word learning study, in which we changed the robotic partner for one group of children while the other group interacted with the same robot. Contrary to work with human social partners, we found that children did not retrieve words differently when interacting with different humanoid robots as their social interaction partners.