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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…
Much of early literacy education happens at home with caretakers reading books to young children. Prior research demonstrates how having dialogue with children during co-reading can develop critical reading readiness skills, but most adult…
We present dialogue management routines for a system to engage in multiparty agent-infant interaction. The ultimate purpose of this research is to help infants learn a visual sign language by engaging them in naturalistic and socially…
Parent-AI collaboration to support real-time conversations with children is challenging due to the sensitivity and open-ended nature of such interactions. Existing systems often simplify collaboration into static modes, providing limited…
Humans' experience of the world is profoundly multimodal from the beginning, so why do existing state-of-the-art language models only use text as a modality to learn and represent semantic meaning? In this paper we review the literature on…
Interaction between caregivers and children plays a critical role in human language acquisition and development. Given this observation, it is remarkable that explicit interaction plays little to no role in artificial language modeling --…
ContextVis introduces a workflow by integrating generative models to create contextual learning materials. It aims to boost knowledge acquisition through the creation of resources with contextual cues. A case study on vocabulary learning…
For immigrants, language preservation is crucial to maintain their identity, but the process of immigration can put a strain on a community's ability to do so. We interviewed eight Nepali immigrants to understand barriers to language…
Cartoon videos have proven to be effective in learning vocabulary to preschool children.However, we have little knowledge about integrating AI into cartoon videos to provide systematic, multimodal vocabulary learning support. This…
Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…
To tackle the vocabulary problem in conversational systems, previous work has applied unsupervised learning approaches on co-occurring speech and eye gaze during interaction to automatically acquire new words. Although these approaches have…
Building intelligent agents that can communicate with and learn from humans in natural language is of great value. Supervised language learning is limited by the ability of capturing mainly the statistics of training data, and is hardly…
Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual process. In this work, we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their first language, and developed a computational process for word acquisition through…
We propose a method for training language models in an interactive setting inspired by child language acquisition. In our setting, a speaker attempts to communicate some information to a listener in a single-turn dialogue and receives a…
As minimally verbal autistic (MVA) children communicate with parents through few words and nonverbal cues, parents often struggle to encourage their children to express subtle emotions and needs and to grasp their nuanced signals. We…
Children with Autism commonly face difficulties in vocabulary acquisition, which can have an impact on their social communication. Using digital tools for vocabulary learning can prove beneficial for these children, as they can provide a…
To cooperate with humans effectively, virtual agents need to be able to understand and execute language instructions. A typical setup to achieve this is with a scripted teacher which guides a virtual agent using language instructions.…
Human intelligence can remarkably adapt quickly to new tasks and environments. Starting from a very young age, humans acquire new skills and learn how to solve new tasks either by imitating the behavior of others or by following provided…
Using online information discovery as a case study, in this position paper we discuss the need to design, develop, and deploy (conversational) agents that can -- non-intrusively -- guide children in their quest for online resources rather…
Cognitive control, the ability of a system to adapt to the demands of a task, is an integral part of cognition. A widely accepted fact about cognitive control is that it is context-sensitive: Adults and children alike infer information…