A Comparison of Children Learning New Words from Robots, Tablets, & People

This work investigates young children’s perceptions of social robots in a learning context. Because social robots are a relatively new technology, direct comparison to more familiar means of learning could give us useful insights. Here, we compared the efficacy of three sources of information (human, robot, and tablet/iPad) with respect to children’s rapid learning of new words. Our results suggested that in this simple case, all three interlocutors served equally well as providers of new words. However, children strongly preferred learning with the robot, and considered it to be more like a person than like an iPad. Follow-up work will examine more complex learning tasks.