Exploring young children's engagement in joint reading with a conversational agent

Abstract

Joint book reading is a highly routinized activity that is nearly universal among families. Conversational agents (CAs) can potentially act as joint-reading partners by engaging children in story-related, scaffolded conversations. In this project, we develop a CA reading partner that incorporates components of effective conversational guidance (i.e., questions to stimulate thinking, specific feedback, and adaptive scaffolding) and examine children's interactions with this CA. We identify patterns in children's language production, flow maintenance, and affect when responding to the CA. We then lay out a set of affordances and challenges for developing CAs as conversation partners. We propose that, rather than attempting to develop CAs as an exact replicate of human conversational partners, we should treat child-agent interaction as a new genre of conversation and calibrate CAs based on children's actual communicative practices and needs.