A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Ages <s> Contents: Preface. D. Birdsong, Introduction: Whys and Why Nots of the Critical Period Hypothesis for Second Language Acquisition. C.M. Weber-Fox, H.J. Neville, Functional Neural Subsystems Are Differentially Affected by Delays in Second Language Immersion: ERP and Behavioral Evidence in Bilinguals. J.R. Hurford, S. Kirby, Co-Evolution of Language Size and the Critical Period. L. Eubank, K.R. Gregg, Critical Periods and (Second) Language Acquisition: Divide et Impera. J.E. Flege, Age of Learning and Second Language Speech. T. Bongaerts, Ultimate Attainment in L2 Pronunciation: The Case of Very Advanced Late L2 Learners. E. Bialystok, K. Hakuta, Confounded Age: Linguistic and Cognitive Factors in Age Differences for Second Language Acquisition. <s> BIB001 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Ages <s> Robots increasingly have the potential to interact with people in daily life. It is believed that, based on this ability, they will play an essential role in human society in the not-so-distant future. This article examined the proposition that robots could form relationships with children and that children might learn from robots as they learn from other children. In this article, this idea is studied in an 18-day field trial held at a Japanese elementary school. Two English-speaking "Robovie" robots interacted with first- and sixth-grade pupils at the perimeter of their respective classrooms. Using wireless identification tags and sensors, these robots identified and interacted with children who came near them. The robots gestured and spoke English with the children, using a vocabulary of about 300 sentences for speaking and 50 words for recognition. The children were given a brief picture-word matching English test at the start of the trial, after 1 week and after 2 weeks. Interactions were counted using the tags, and video and audio were recorded. In the majority of cases, a child's friends were present during the interactions. Interaction with the robot was frequent in the 1st week, and then it fell off sharply by the 2nd week. Nonetheless, some children continued to interact with the robot. Interaction time during the 2nd week predicted improvements in English skill at the posttest, controlling for pretest scores. Further analyses indicate that the robots may have been more successful in establishing common ground and influence when the children already had some initial proficiency or interest in English. These results suggest that interactive robots should be designed to have something in common with their users, providing a social as well as technical challenge. <s> BIB002 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Ages <s> We report results of a study in which a low cost sociable robot was immersed at an Early Childhood Education Center for a period of 2 weeks. The study was designed to investigate whether the robot, which operated fully autonomously during the intervention period, could improve target vocabulary skills of 18-24 month of age toddlers. The results showed a 27 % improvement in knowledge of the target words taught by the robot when compared to a matched set of control words. The results suggest that sociable robots may be an effective and low cost technology to enrich Early Childhood Education environments. <s> BIB003 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Ages <s> This paper investigates the role of interaction and communication kinesics in human–robot interaction. This study is part of a novel research project on sign language (SL) tutoring through interaction games with humanoid robots. The main goal is to motivate the children with communication problems to understand and imitate the signs implemented by the robot using basic upper torso gestures and sound. We present an empirical and exploratory study investigating the effect of basic nonverbal gestures consisting of hand movements, body and face gestures expressed by a humanoid robot, and having comprehended the word, the participants will give relevant feedback in SL. This way the participant is both a passive observer and an active imitator throughout the learning process in different phases of the game. A five-fingered R3 robot platform and a three-fingered Nao H-25 robot are employed within the games. Vision-, sound-, touch- and motion-based cues are used for multimodal communication between the robot, child and therapist/parent within the study. This paper presents the preliminary results of the proposed game tested with adult participants. The aim is to evaluate the SL learning ability of participants from a robot, and compare different robot platforms within this setup. <s> BIB004 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Ages <s> This thesis investigates the effect on having a physical robot present to take the role of a teacher or exercise partner in a language learning exercise. In order to investigate this, an applicatio ... <s> BIB005 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Ages <s> Computer assisted language learning (CALL) is going to be more attractive, more interactive and more realistic by introducing humanoid robots. We propose a novel joining-in type robot assisted language learning (RALL) system using two humanoid robots, one playing a role of a teacher and the other playing a role of an advanced learner. The system has a seamless scenario of a natural dialogue flow among two robots and a learner to draw the learner into the dialogue. We designed the system to switch two modes of learning: tutoring and peer learning. As a characteristic behavior of the peer learning, we expect an “alignment” phenomenon between the robot's sample answer and the learner's utterance. That is to say, the learner learns a sentence pattern by mimicking a sample answer presented by the advanced learner robot. We created a learner corpus of over 60 participants, carried out an analysis on how much alignment occurred in the interactions. <s> BIB006 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Ages <s> Teaching with robots is a developing field, wherein one major challenge is creating lesson plans to be taught by a robot. We introduce a novel strategy for generating lesson material, in which we draw upon an existing corpus of electronic lesson material and develop a mapping from the original material to the robot lesson, thereby greatly reducing the time and effort required to create robot lessons. We present a system, KubiLingo, in which we implement content mapping for language lessons. With permission, we use Duolingo as the source of our content. In a study with 24 users, we demonstrate that user performance improves by a statistically similar amount with a robot lesson as with Duolingo lesson. We find that KubiLingo is more distracting and less likeable than Duolingo, indicating the need for improvements to the robot’s design. <s> BIB007
For the most part, children between the ages of 3 and 14 years have been studied. There has been only one study with children under 2 BIB003 and few studies with adult participants  BIB006  BIB004    BIB007 BIB005 . There are probably several reasons for this, including the fact that children learn language easier than adults BIB001  , that infants and toddlers can be challenging to handle during the course of an experiment and often require special methodological approaches to testing (e.g., preferential looking tests for pre-verbal infants), and that many countries require foreign language class enrollment for children during elementary school. Worth noting is that age may influence how learners perceive technology and the appropriateness of a given intervention. Though not many studies have looked at this, one study did find that younger students (first-graders) were more interested and interacted longer with the robot than older students (sixth-graders) during the first week of the study BIB002 .