One of the many purposes for which social robots are designed is education, and there have been many attempts to systematize their potential in this field. What these attempts have in common is the recognition that learning can be supported in a variety of ways because a learner can be engaged in different activities that foster learning. Up to now, three roles have been proposed when designing these activities for robots: as a teacher or tutor, a learning peer, or a novice. Current research proposes that deciding in favor of one role over another depends on the content or preferred pedagogical form. However, the design of activities changes not only the content of learning, but also the nature of a human–robot social relationship. This is particularly important in language acquisition, which has been recognized as a social endeavor. The following review aims to specify the differences in human–robot social relationships when children learn language through interacting with a social robot. After proposing categories for comparing these different relationships, we review established and more specific, innovative roles that a robot can play in language-learning scenarios. This follows Mead’s (1946) theoretical approach proposing that social roles are performed in interactive acts. These acts are crucial for learning, because not only can they shape the social environment of learning but also engage the learner to different degrees. We specify the degree of engagement by referring to Chi’s (2009) progression of learning activities that range from active, constructive, toward interactive with the latter fostering deeper learning. Taken together, this approach enables us to compare and evaluate different human–robot social relationships that arise when applying a robot in a particular social role.
In word learning, one key accomplishment is the reference, that is, the linking of a word to its referent. According to classical theories, the term
reference
captures a mental event: A person uses a word to mentally recall a concept of an entity (an object or event) in order to bring it into the mental focus of an interaction. The developmental literature proposes different approaches regarding how children accomplish this link. Although researchers agree that multiple processes (within and across phonological, lexical, and semantic areas) are responsible for word learning, recent research has highlighted the role of saliency and perception as crucial factors in the early phases of word learning. Generally speaking, whereas some approaches to solving the reference problem attribute a greater role to the referent’s properties being salient, others emphasize the social context that is needed to select the appropriate referent. In this review, we aim to systematize terminology and propose that the reason why assessments of the impact of saliency on word learning are controversial is that definitions of the term
saliency
reveal different weightings of the importance that either perceptual or social stimuli have for the learning process. We propose that defining early word learning in terms of paying attention to salient stimuli is too narrow. Instead, we emphasize that a new link between a word and its referent will succeed if a stimulus is
relevant
for the child.
Pointing is one of the first conventional means of communication and infants have various motives for engaging in it such as imperative, declarative, or informative. Little is known about the developmental paths of producing and understanding these different motives. In our longitudinal study (N = 58) during the second year of life, we experimentally elicited infants’ pointing production and comprehension in various settings and under pragmatically valid conditions. We followed two steps in our analyses and assessed the occurrence of canonical index-finger pointing for different motives and the engagement in an ongoing interaction in pursuit of a joint goal revealed by frequency and multimodal utterances. For understanding the developmental paths, we compared two groups: typically developing infants (TD) and infants who have been assessed as having delayed language development (LD). Results showed that the developmental paths differed according to the various motives. When comparing the two groups, for all motives, LD infants produced index-finger pointing 2 months later than TD infants. For the engagement, although the pattern was less consistent across settings, the frequency of pointing was comparable in both groups, but infants with LD used less canonical forms of pointing and made fewer multimodal contributions than TD children.
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