Conversational User Interfaces As Assistive interlocutors For Young Children's Bilingual Language Acquisition

TL;DR

This paper explores designing conversational user interfaces as assistive tools to support bilingual language acquisition in young children, addressing challenges faced by multilingual families.

Contribution

It introduces a preliminary framework for conversational interfaces aimed at aiding bilingual language learning in children, based on literature review and parental interviews.

Findings

Identified key objectives for conversational interface design

Highlighted potential benefits for children's bilingual development

Proposed a preliminary design framework

Abstract

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.