Once Upon a Time… Acquisition of Second Language Vocabulary Through Robotic Storytelling in Classroom Settings

Given their embodied social nature, robots have the potential to facilitate educational processes. As childhood is an opportune age to introduce a new language, robots could be particularly useful in the area of second language (L2) learning for children. This study assessed whether a social robot could provide efficient teaching to young children and how social cues of joint attention (pointing and gazing) can influence L2 learning. 82 children participated in an experiment with the Nao robot telling a story in French, adding -or not- joint attention gestures to the story (interactive versus non interactive robot). During the storytelling, target-words were frequently repeated by the robot and were then used to evaluate children’s learning through a preferential looking procedure (PLP) with an eye-tracking system, thus providing a quantitative measurement of learning. To our knowledge, no other study has combined a storytelling task with eye-tracking to quantify learning gains. Both behavioral and gaze data indicated that children are able to learn the vocabulary provided during storytelling by the two types of robots, although there is an advantage for the interactive robot that triggered more significant learning results (particularly for gaze data that is a more reliable measure than pointing). Our findings suggest that social robots can be used effectively as teachers for L2 learning, but also that learning can be influenced positively by their social nature and behaviors. Indeed, providing explicit social signals in a timely manner, such as joint attention markers, seems to be particularly important for more efficient learning.