Do children accept virtual agents as foreign language trainers
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Virtual (animated software) agents can train humans in vocabulary learning. This has been successfully tested with adults and more recently also with children. However, the question of how children perceive a virtual agent training them had not been investigated. Here we invited 25 children to evaluate their perception of a virtual and a human trainer who presented written words in a foreign language on videos; both the human trainer and the virtual agent additionally performed a semantically related gesture for each word. Subjects rated the trainers for features related to gestures and for their “personalities”. Subjects found human gestures better and gave the human trainer higher sympathy scores; however, the overall difference between their perception of virtual and human trainers was not significant.
Source: Max Planck Digital Library
Authors: Manuela Macedonia, Roland Kern, Friedrich Roithmayr
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1498077027