Using a robot peer to encourage the production of spatial concepts in a second language

Abstract

We conducted a study with 25 children to investigate the effectiveness of a robot measuring and encouraging production of spatial concepts in a second language compared to a human experimenter. Productive vocabulary is often not measured in second language learning, due to the difficulty of both learning and assessing productive learning gains. We hypothesized that a robot peer may help assessing productive vocabulary. Previous studies on foreign language learning have found that robots can help to reduce language anxiety, leading to improved results. In our study we found that a robot is able to reach a similar performance to the experimenter in getting children to produce, despite the person's advantages in social ability, and discuss the extent to which a robot may be suitable for this task.