“You” versus “children”: A repeated-measures experiment on the effects of social robots’ use of (im)personal address forms when talking to children

Address forms are an important element of communication and can both reflect and affect how social robots are responded to. However, their effects on children's responses to social robots remain understudied. To fill this gap initially, we conducted an online repeated-measures experiment to investigate the effects of a robot's use of personal (“you”) versus impersonal (“children”) address forms on children's involvement in the interaction, their perception of the robot (in terms of cognitive and affective perspective-taking and social support) and their relationship with it (i.e., feelings of closeness and trust). Children ( N = 282, age 8–9) watched two videos of a Nao robot with one week in between, in which the robot addressed them either personally or impersonally. We expected that children would respond more positively to a robot that always used personal address forms than to a robot that always used impersonal address forms, resulting in higher scores on all aforementioned variables. In addition, we expected that a change from impersonal to personal address forms over encounters would positively influence children's involvement, perception of the robot, and relationship with it, and vice versa for a change from personal to impersonal address forms. However, we did not find any significant effects of address form. We discuss the lack of significant findings in light of the differences between communication with humans versus machines.