L2 Vocabulary Learning Through Lexical Inferencing Stories With a Social Robot

Vocabulary is a crucial part of second language (L2) learning. Children learn new vocabulary by forming mental lexicon relations with their existing knowledge. This is called lexical inferencing: using the available clues and knowledge to guess the meaning of the unknown word. This study explored the potential of second language vocabulary acquisition through lexical inferencing in child-robot interaction. A storytelling robot read a book to Dutch kindergartners (N = 36, aged 4-6 years) in Dutch in which a few key words were translated into French (L2), and with a robot providing additional word explanation cues or not. The results showed that the children learned the key words successfully as a result of the reading session with the storytelling robot, but that there was no significant effect of additional word explanation cues by the robot. Overall, it seems promising that lexical inferencing can act as a new and different way to teach kindergartners a second language.