Influence of 10 seconds´ interval in pragmatic interpretation

This study examined interpreting word meanings and movement of line-of-regard of participants in a joint attention experiment. In addition to immediately giving an object label to a child, we tested an effect of 10 seconds´ interval on children and adults using a joint attention experiment. Results were that adults used both pragmatic and eye gaze cues and interpreted word meanings appropriately. However, 4-year-old children tended to use only a pragmatic cue in the similar task ignoring eye gaze when a label was given after 10 seconds elapsed. 2-year-old children used only eye gaze. The study suggested that with an immature interactive system a child tends to rely only one or a few non-linguistic cues in interaction. Implication of this study is that robots must be able to use various non-linguistic cues with an integrated manner in human-robot interactions.