Storytelling with robots: Learning companions for preschool children´s language development

Children´s oral language skills in preschool can predict their academic success later in life. As such, increasing children´s skills early on could improve their success in middle and high school. To this end, we propose that a robotic learning companion could supplement children´s early language education. The robot targets both the social nature of language learning and the adaptation necessary to help individual children. The robot is designed as a social character that interacts with children as a peer, not as a tutor or teacher. It will play a storytelling game, during which it will introduce new vocabulary words, and model good story narration skills, such as including a beginning, middle, and end; varying sentence structure; and keeping cohesion across the story. We will evaluate whether adapting the robot´s level of language to the child´s - so that, as children improve their storytelling skills, so does the robot - influences (i) whether children learn new words from the robot, (ii) the complexity and style of stories children tell, (iii) the similarity of children´s stories to the robot´s stories. We expect children will learn more from a robot that adapts to maintain an equal or greater ability than the children, and that they will copy its stories and narration style more than they would with a robot that does not adapt (a robot of lesser ability). However, we also expect that playing with a robot of lesser ability could prompt teaching or mentoring behavior from children, which could also be beneficial to language learning.