Conversational User Interfaces As Assistive interlocutors For Young Children's Bilingual Language Acquisition
This work targets an incremental improvement in assistive technology for multilingual families, focusing on a specific domain of early childhood education.
The paper explores designing conversational user interfaces to assist young children in bilingual language acquisition, addressing parental struggles with language exposure, and presents preliminary design objectives based on literature review and parent interviews.
Children in a large number of international and cross-cultural families in and outside of the US learn and speak more than one language. However, parents often struggle to acquaint their young children with their local language if the child spends majority of time at home and with their spoken language if they go to daycare or school. By reviewing relevant literature about the role of screen media content in young children's language learning, and interviewing a subset of parents raising multilingual children, we explore the potential of designing conversational user interfaces which can double as an assistive language aid.We present a preliminary list of objectives to guide the the design of conversational user interfaces dialogue for young children's bilingual language acquisition.