Exploring the Effects of a Social Robot's Speech Entrainment and Backstory on Young Children's Emotion, Rapport, Relationship, and Learning.

ABSTRACT: In positive human-human relationships, people frequently mirror or mimic each other's behavior. This mimicry, also called entrainment, is associated with rapport and smoother social interaction. Because rapport in learning scenarios has been shown to lead to improved learning outcomes, we examined whether enabling a social robotic learning companion to perform rapport-building behaviors could improve children's learning and engagement during a storytelling activity. We enabled the social robot to perform two specific rapport and relationship-building behaviors: speech entrainment and self-disclosure (shared personal information in the form of a backstory about the robot's poor speech and hearing abilities). We recruited 86 children aged 3-8 years to interact with the robot in a 2 × 2 betwe

SUBMITTER: Kory-Westlund JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7806080 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature