Robots Speak Up: Study Reveals English-Speaking Robots Boost Parent-Child Conversations

In recent years, scientists have created numerous sophisticated social and assistive robots that may soon enter homes across the globe. It’s essential to comprehend how integrating these machines might affect residents' daily lives and relationships within the household. This insight could guide enhancements to the robots prior to their broader release.

New research indicates that home-based robotic companions might enhance educational dialogues between adults and kids, notably when reading stories together. These robots boost engagement with activities like posing queries or playing along, which can deepen exchanges among family members and aid in expanding young learners' vocabularies.

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) conducted a recent investigation aimed at delving deeper into how social robots can act as stimuli for conversations and aids in improving exchanges between kids and their parents. They published their conclusions, published in Science Robotics It is suggested that English-speaking robots could enhance the quality of conversations between parents and children, with families who are fluent in English benefiting more from their usage.

Huili Chen, Yubin Kim, and their team members noted in their research paper, "The incorporation of social robots into household settings brings up significant inquiries regarding their potential lasting impact on familial communications."

This research examines how social robots can act as conversation starters in interactions between two people, particularly emphasizing their role in improving meaningful back-and-forth communication between mothers and fathers with their kids during shared reading sessions.

Chen, Kim, and fellow researchers investigated the impact of the social robot on parent-child dynamics by conducting multiple trials featuring the social robot Jibo, developed jointly by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor. This involved deploying the robot into the residences of 71 households where children aged 3 to 7 lived.

Throughout a span of 1 to 2 months, each family participated in six interactive sessions where they engaged with the Jibo robot while reading stories together. In these storytelling sessions, the Jibo robot assumed one of three roles: as a passive observer, as an active participant showing consistent behavior, or as an involved party alternating among various actions.

In this newest feature, the robot would jump into the scene as the parent reads a story, posing questions, initiating conversations, or acting as an inquisitive kid. Notably, the study revealed that the proficiency of the parents in speaking English—the language used by Jibo—played a role in determining how much these parental-child engagements benefited from the robot’s interventions.

According to our research, involving a robot actively improves the quality of parent-child dialogic interactions," noted Chen, Kim, and co-authors. "The impact of robotic assistance depended on the parents' fluency in English. Families where neither parent was a native English speaker gained more advantages from strategy-switching robots, while those with fluent English-speaking parents saw larger gains when using fixed-strategy robots.

In general, Chen, Kim, and their team noticed that during interactive reading sessions where the Jibo robot took an active part, parents became more engaged in discussions with their children, leading to more enriched exchanges. Non-native English-speaking parents saw the greatest improvement in conversation quality when the robot alternated among various behaviors. Conversely, native English-speaking families experienced greater benefits when the robot consistently exhibited the same set of predefined actions.

The researchers noted that these findings highlight the significance of adaptable and varied methods for robotic interactions to guarantee fair advantages for families with differing characteristics.

This latest research aligns with earlier studies indicating that interactive home robots might assist parents during storytelling times, aiding in expanding their kids' vocabularies and improving conversational abilities. Going forward, these insights may lead to the creation of advanced robots tailored specifically to boost communication between parents and children who have different levels of linguistic proficiency.

More information: Huili Chen and colleagues suggest that social robots can act as conversation starters, thereby improving prolonged human-to-human communication within households. Science Robotics (2025). DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adk3307 .

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