The Effect of a Robot’s Gestures and Adaptive Tutoring on Children’s Acquisition of Second Language Vocabularies

This paper presents a study in which children, four to six years old, were taught words in a second language by a robot tutor. The goal is to evaluate two ways for a robot to provide scaffolding for students: the use of iconic gestures, combined with adaptively choosing the next learning task based on the child’s past performance. The results show a positive effect on long-term memorization of novel words, and an overall higher level of engagement during the learning activities when gestures are used. The adaptive tutoring strategy reduces the extent to which the level of engagement is diminishing during the later part of the interaction.