Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SCIL (The role of social cues for infant word learning)
Reporting period: 2018-04-01 to 2019-03-31
Understanding how the social environment shapes language learning is crucial for improving our recommendations for caregivers and educators. SCIL specifically contributes to recommendations pertaining to the role of interactive screen media in language education.
Across studies, we find that contingent reactivity improves the learning of novel word-object associations, but only if the virtual agent retains a certain degree of human-likeness. These results provide new insight into the minimum amount of social cues infants need in order to learn from an interaction partner. These results have been presented at numerous international conferences and as invited talks in labs in Europe, the US, and Japan. One of the studies is published, another under review, and two more pending write-up