More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

research-article

Second language tutoring using social robots: a large-scale study

HRI '19: Proceedings of the 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

Pages 497 - 505

Published: 10 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

We present a large-scale study of a series of seven lessons designed to help young children learn English vocabulary as a foreign language using a social robot. The experiment was designed to investigate 1) the effectiveness of a social robot teaching children new words over the course of multiple interactions (supported by a tablet), 2) the added benefit of a robot's iconic gestures on word learning and retention, and 3) the effect of learning from a robot tutor accompanied by a tablet versus learning from a tablet application alone. For reasons of transparency, the research questions, hypotheses and methods were preregistered. With a sample size of 194 children, our study was statistically well-powered. Our findings demonstrate that children are able to acquire and retain English vocabulary words taught by a robot tutor to a similar extent as when they are taught by a tablet application. In addition, we found no beneficial effect of a robot's iconic gestures on learning gains.

References

[1]

T. Belpaeme, J. Kennedy, A. Ramachandran, B. Scassellati, and F. Tanaka, "Social robots for education: A review," Science Robotics, vol. 3, no. 21, p. eaat5954, 2018.

[2]

I. Leite, M. McCoy, M. Lohani, D. Ullman, N. Salomons, C. Stokes, S. Rivers, and B. Scassellati, "Emotional Storytelling in the Classroom: Individual versus Group Interaction between Children and Robots." ACM Press, 2015, pp. 75--82.

[3]

T. Belpaeme, P. Vogt, R. Van den Berghe, K. Bergmann, T. Göksun, M. De Haas, J. Kanero, J. Kennedy, A. C. Küntay, O. Oudgenoeg-Paz et al., "Guidelines for designing social robots as second language tutors," International Journal of Social Robotics, pp. 1--17, 2018.

[4]

T. Kanda, T. Hirano, D. Eaton, and H. Ishiguro, "Interactive Robots as Social Partners and Peer Tutors for Children: A Field Trial," J Hum Comp Interact, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 61--84, 2004.

Digital Library

[5]

S. Lee, H. Noh, J. Lee, K. Lee, G. G. Lee, S. Sagong, and M. Kim, "On the effectiveness of robot-assisted language learning," ReCALL, vol. 23, no. 01, pp. 25--58, 2011.

Digital Library

[6]

J. K. Westlund and C. Breazeal, "The Interplay of Robot Language Level with Children's Language Learning during Storytelling." ACM Press, 2015, pp. 65--66.

[7]

D. Leyzberg, S. Spaulding, M. Toneva, and B. Scassellati, "The physical presence of a robot tutor increases cognitive learning gains," in Proc of the 34th Annual Conf of the Cognitive Science Society, 2012.

[8]

K. VanLehn, "The relative effectiveness of human tutoring, intelligent tutoring systems, and other tutoring systems," Educational Psychologist, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 197--221, 2011.

[9]

M. Saerbeck, T. Schut, C. Bartneck, and M. D. Janse, "Expressive Robots in Education: Varying the Degree of Social Supportive Behavior of a Robotic Tutor," in Proc of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2010, pp. 1613--1622.

[10]

J. Kennedy, P. Baxter, E. Senft, and T. Belpaeme, "Social Robot Tutoring for Child Second Language Learning," in Proc of the 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. ACM, 2016, pp. 67--74.

[11]

J. de Wit, T. Schodde, B. Willemsen, K. Bergmann, M. de Haas, S. Kopp, E. Krahmer, and P. Vogt, "The effect of a robot's gestures and adaptive tutoring on children's acquisition of second language vocabularies," in Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. ACM, 2018, pp. 50--58.

[12]

K. Dautenhahn, "Human-robot interaction," The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed., 2013.

[13]

P. Baxter, J. Kennedy, E. Senft, S. Lemaignan, and T. Belpaeme, "From characterising three years of HRI to methodology and reporting recommendations," in The Eleventh ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction. IEEE Press, 2016, pp. 391--398.

[14]

I. Leite, C. Martinho, and A. Paiva, "Social robots for long-term interaction: a survey," International Journal of Social Robotics, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 291--308, 2013.

[15]

L. M. Marulis and S. B. Neuman, "The Effects of Vocabulary Intervention on Young Children's Word Learning: A Meta-Analysis," Rev Educ Res, vol. 80, no. 3, pp. 300--335, 2010.

[16]

G. Gordon, S. Spaulding, J. K. Westlund, J. J. Lee, L. Plummer, M. Martinez, M. Das, and C. Breazeal, "Affective Personalization of a Social Robot Tutor for Childrens Second Language Skills," in Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2016.

[17]

J. R. Movellan, M. Eckhardt, M. Virnes, and A. Rodriguez, "Sociable robot improves toddler vocabulary skills," in Proc of the 4th ACM/IEEE Int Conf on Human-Robot Interaction, 2009, pp. 307--308.

[18]

H. H. Clark, Using Language. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

[19]

G. Pezzulo, L. W. Barsalou, A. Cangelosi, M. H. Fischer, K. McRae, and M. Spivey, "Computational grounded cognition: a new alliance between grounded cognition and computational modeling," Frontiers in psychology, vol. 3, p. 612, 2013.

[20]

A. M. Glenberg, "Embodiment for education," Handbook of cognitive science: An embodied approach, pp. 355--372, 2008.

[21]

D. McNeill, Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. University of Chicago press, 1992.

[22]

M. Tomasselo and J. Todd, "Joint attention and lexical acquisition style," First Lang, vol. 4, pp. 197--212, 1983.

[23]

M. Tellier, "The effect of gestures on second language memorisation by young children," Gestures in Language Development, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 219--235, 2008.

[24]

M. Macedonia and K. von Kriegstein, "Gestures enhance foreign language learning," Biolinguistics, vol. 6, no. 3-4, pp. 393--416, 2012.

[25]

M. Macedonia, K. Bergmann, and F. Roithmayr, "Imitation of a pedagogical agents gestures enhances memory for words in second language," Science Journal of Education, vol. 2, no. 5, pp. 162--169, 2014.

[26]

S. D. Kelly, T. McDevitt, and M. Esch, "Brief training with co-speech gesture lends a hand to word learning in a foreign language," Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 313--334, 2009.

[27]

B. Irfan, J. Kennedy, S. Lemaignan, F. Papadopoulos, E. Senft, and T. Belpaeme, "Social psychology and human-robot interaction: An uneasy marriage," in Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. ACM, 2018, pp. 13--20.

[28]

G.-Z. Yang, J. Bellingham, P. E. Dupont, P. Fischer, L. Floridi, R. Full, N. Jacobstein, V. Kumar, M. McNutt, R. Merrifield et al., "The grand challenges of science robotics," Science Robotics, vol. 3, no. 14, p. eaar7650, 2018.

[29]

J. Kennedy, S. Lemaignan, C. Montassier, P. Lavalade, B. Irfan, F. Papadopoulos, E. Senft, and T. Belpaeme, "Child Speech Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction: Evaluations and Recommendations," in Proc of the 12th ACM/IEEE Int Conf on Human-Robot Interaction. ACM, 2017, pp. 82--90.

[30]

J. Kanero, O. E. Demir-Lira, S. Koskulu, G. Oranç, I. Franko, A. C. Küntay, and T. Göksun, "How do robot gestures help second language learning?" in Earli SIG 5 Abstract book, 2018.

[31]

L. M. Dunn, L. M. Dunn, and L. Schlichting, Peabody picture vocabulary test-III-NL. Amsterdam: Pearson, 2005.

[32]

H. Mulder, H. Hoofs, J. Verhagen, I. van der Veen, and P. P. M. Leseman, "Psychometric properties and convergent and predictive validity of an executive function test battery for two-year-olds," Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 5, p. 733, 2014.

[33]

S. Chiat, "Non-word repetition," in Methods for assessing multilingual children: Disentangling bilingualism from language impairment,. N. M. E. S. Armon-Lotem, J. de Jong, Ed. Bristol: Multilingualism Matters, 2015, pp. 227--250.

[34]

C. Zaga, M. Lohse, K. P. Truong, and V. Evers, "The effect of a robots social character on childrens task engagement: Peer versus tutor," in International Conference on Social Robotics. Springer, 2015, pp. 704--713.

[35]

C. D. Wallbridge, S. Lemaignan, and T. Belpaeme, "Qualitative review of object recognition techniques for tabletop manipulation," in Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Human Agent Interaction. ACM, 2017, pp. 359--363.

[36]

J. Kennedy, P. Baxter, and T. Belpaeme, "The robot who tried too hard: Social behaviour of a robot tutor can negatively affect child learning," in Proceedings of the tenth annual ACM/IEEE International conference on Human-Robot Interaction. ACM, 2015, pp. 67--74.

[37]

T. Schodde, K. Bergmann, and S. Kopp, "Adaptive Robot Language Tutoring Based on Bayesian Knowledge Tracing and Predictive Decision-Making," in Proc of the 12th ACM/IEEE Int Conf on Human-Robot Interaction. ACM, 2017.

[38]

J. Kory Westlund, L. Dickens, S. Jeong, P. Harris, D. DeSteno, and C. Breazeal, "A comparison of children learning new words from robots, tablets, & people," in Proceedings of the 1st Int Conf on Social Robots in Therapy and Education, 2015.

[39]

J.-A. Mondria and B. Wiersma, "Receptive, productive, and receptive+ productive l2 vocabulary learning: What difference does it make," Vocabulary in a second language: Selection, acquisition, and testing, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 79--100, 2004.

Cited By

Bartlett MEdmunds CBelpaeme TThill S(2022)Have I Got the Power? Analysing and Reporting Statistical Power in HRIACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/349524611:2(1-16)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3495246
Schneiders ECheon EKjeldskov JRehm MSkov M(2022)Non-Dyadic Interaction: A Literature Review of 15 Years of Human-Robot Interaction Conference PublicationsACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/348824211:2(1-32)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3488242

Recommendations

Second language tutoring using social robots: L2TOR - the movie
HRI '19: Proceedings of the 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

This video illustrates the large-scale experiment of the L2TOR project that will be presented at the HRI 2019 conference. The experiment aimed to investigate how 192 Dutch 5-year-old children could learn 34 English words from a NAO robot in 7 lessons. ...
The Interplay of Robot Language Level with Children's Language Learning during Storytelling
HRI'15 Extended Abstracts: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction Extended Abstracts

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 ...
Transparency, Teleoperation, and Children's Understanding of Social Robots
HRI '16: The Eleventh ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction

Teleoperation or Wizard-of-Oz control of social robots is commonly used in human-robot interaction (HRI) research. This is especially true for child-robot interactions, where technologies like speech recognition (which can help create autonomous ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

HRI '19: Proceedings of the 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

March 2019

812 pages

ISBN:9781538685556

General Chairs:
Jung Kim
KAIST, Korea
,
Adriana Tapus
ENSTA ParisTech, France
,
Program Chairs:
David Sirkin
Stanford University
,
Malte Jung
Cornell University
,
Sonya S. Kwak
KIST, Korea

Sponsors

In-Cooperation

IEEE-RAS: Robotics and Automation

Publisher

IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 10 January 2020

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

HRI '19

Sponsor:

HRI '19: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

March 11 - 14, 2019

Daegu, Republic of Korea

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,124 submissions, 24%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

2
Total Citations
View Citations
174
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)24
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 25 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Bartlett MEdmunds CBelpaeme TThill S(2022)Have I Got the Power? Analysing and Reporting Statistical Power in HRIACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/349524611:2(1-16)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3495246
Schneiders ECheon EKjeldskov JRehm MSkov M(2022)Non-Dyadic Interaction: A Literature Review of 15 Years of Human-Robot Interaction Conference PublicationsACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/348824211:2(1-32)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3488242

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten