Research on literacy development suggests that children use particular aspects of oral language to help them acquire particular written language skills. Children's success in using certain syntactic, semantic and pragmatic devices to create and organize events during oral storytelling may be indicative of academic success, conversational dexterity, and ability to acquire later literacy skills. For the most part oral storytelling does not take place by children speaking to themselves and it turns out that peer oral storytelling has been shown to be more successful than adult-child storytelling in scaffolding these important uses of oral language.
In this talk I discuss the development of narrative technologies that can scaffold children's written literacy development by playing the role of a storytelling peer. In previous research we have shown that narrative technologies can encourage children to tell linguistically sophisticated and decontextualized stories. In other previous research we have shown that embodied conversational agents that rely on social protocols of conversation can lead uers to trust the interface more, believe the system is more knowledgeable, and find the interaction more successful. In this new research we examine the intersection of building peers and building narrative-eliciting artifacts, with the goal of improving young children's access to literacy skills.
Bio: Justine Cassell is an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab where she directs the Gesture and Narrative Language Research Group. She holds a master's degree in Literature from the Universit de Besanon (France), a master's degree in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), and a double Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, in Psychology and in Linguistics. After having spent ten years studying verbal and non-verbal aspects of human communication through microanalysis of videotaped data she began to bring her knowledge of human conversation to the design of computational systems. Currently she and her students are working on the third generation of Embodied Conversational Agent (Rea), and have also integrated the foundations of this work into the design of a 3D graphical online world (BodyChat). Cassell has also researched how embodied conversational agents, and other kinds of virtual listeners, can encourage and enhance narrative literacy activities among children. Cassell has published in journals as diverse as Poetics Today and Computer Graphics, and is the editor of From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (MIT Press, 1998) and Embodied Conversational Agents (MIT Press, 2000).
For the colloquium series schedule, see the UMD Computational Linguistics Colloquium Series web page at http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/cl_colloquium/. If you are interested in meeting with the speaker, please contact Philip Resnik (resnik@umiacs.umd.edu).