hello i'm ying shu and this talk is on
the paper our current voice interfaces
designed to support children's language
development
this paper is co-authored with stacy
branham
xinhua dung penalty collins and mark
washower
so let's first talk about the motivation
of the study
young children developed their language
gifts through everyday communications
with their parents teachers and other
familiar adults
in the recent years voice user
interfaces
or vui's have become increasingly
available and popular among households
with children
these vui's are capable of simulating
speech-based
interpersonal interaction and as such
they may play a role in children's
language development
by serving as the language partners
complementing what traditional human
partners could do
however one big question is how well
this voice-based apps are really
designed to support language development
while many hci studies have proposed
that vui's conversation design should
generally be grounded in human to human
communication
these suggestions are often too general
and not
tailored for children so in this paper
we develop an evaluation framework based
on the adult child communication
literature
that identifies effective dialogue
strategies adults can use to support
children's learning
we then use this framework to evaluate
about 150 voice-based apps
to see whether these apps use the
evidence-based
strategies so let's talk about our
evaluation framework
adult child conversation usually follows
a systematic structure
adults initiate the topic of discussion
and encourage the child's verbal
expression
after the child responds to the problem
the adult then provides feedback abuse
upon the child's response
for the initiation strategies the
research has broadly categorized the
adult questions
into open-ended versus restricted
questions
generally speaking open-ended questions
request higher counts of demands
and listen more complex responses
for the feedback strategies the
literature describes four dimensions
that could be used to categorize the
adult's feedback
contingency whether the feedback is
thematically tailored to children's
response
extension whether feedback deepens the
conversation
based on the child's response
encouragement
whether feedback calls for children to
complete a language test
to their full potential adjustment
whether feedback is adapted to the
child's developmental levels
we used this procedure to identify 143
apps from the google and amazon
platforms for evaluation
i'm going to highlight some interesting
results
in terms of the initiation strategies
most of the apps begin dialog cycles
using problems that restrict
either the length or scope of children's
responses
in terms of the app's feedback strategy
the app's feedback design did not always
come with extensions or encouragement
nor did it adjust the dialogue based on
children's responses
this commits the opportunities to
provide children with effective guidance
during the interaction
moreover apps that ask open-ended
questions are less likely
to be able to provide contingent
feedback than those asking restrictive
questions
now i'm going to contextualize the
findings and show you how some dialogue
strategies play out in an
app the example you see here is a trivia
app
each rectangle represents one dialogue
cycle and there are four in total
each cycle begins with an app asking a
what question
that has a very clear directive that
constrains the scope of the child's
answer
while this app explicitly verifies
whether the answer is correct or
incorrect
it does not provide additional
information that could extend on the
child's response
the final cycle in this app is very
typical of the current voice apps
adjustment and encouragement strategies
the app simply interprets i don't know
as an incorrect response and replies
it is not an answer before asking the
child to try again
also the dialogue cycles are
disconnected
rather than organizing by increasing
difficulty level
or based on the child's competence
based on the findings we propose four
recommendations for
developing vui's that initiate dialogue
and provide feedback
in ways that better facilitate
children's language learning
thank you for your time we're looking
forward to your questions