Acquiring religious words: dialogical and individual construction of a word's meaning.

By the age of eight, there is a significant increase in abstract words in the child's lexicon. A crucial contribution can be seen in the linguistic input, i.e. the way how abstract words are presented by caregivers by means of linguistic perspectivation and emotionalization. Following an interactionist way, we were interested in how the semantics of abstract words is constructed by child and caregiver in duet. We focused on a subset of abstract words and studied the acquisition of meaning of the religious concept mercy. We expected religious words to be emotionally anchored and presented with perspectivation, both contributing to learning. Exploring the dialogic constructions, we investigated eight 7- to 8-year olds and their parents during dialogic reading and studied their strategies focusing on the linguistic means of emotionalization and perspectivation in contextualizing the word. In a subsequent test, we analysed these means used by the children and assessed their individual understanding of mercy. Our analyses indicate that during reading, the enrichment of semantics by emotionalization was related between child and caregiver, whereas cross-situationally, a simultaneous enrichment of emotionalization and perspectivation was present. Moreover, the children demonstrated a conceptual understanding of mercy in religious contexts, but not in secular contexts. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Do Shy Preschoolers Interact Differently When Learning Language With a Social Robot? An Analysis of Interactional Behavior and Word Learning.

Temperamental traits can decisively influence how children enter into social interaction with their environment. Yet, in the field of child-robot interaction, little is known about how individual differences such as shyness impact on how children interact with social robots in educational settings. The present study systematically assessed the temperament of 28 preschool children aged 4-5 years in order to investigate the role of shyness within a dyadic child-robot interaction. Over the course of four consecutive sessions, we observed how shy compared to nonshy children interacted with a social robot during a word-learning educational setting and how shyness influenced children's learning outcomes. Overall, results suggested that shy children not only interacted differently with a robot compared to nonshy children, but also changed their behavior over the course of the sessions. Critically, shy children interacted less expressively with the robot in general. With regard to children's language learning outcomes, shy children scored lower on an initial posttest, but were able to close this gap on a later test, resulting in all children retrieving the learned words on a similar level. When intertest learning gain was considered, regression analyses even confirmed a positive predictive role of shyness on language learning gains. Findings are discussed with regard to the role of shyness in educational settings with social robots and the implications for future interaction design.