Sebastian Feller

Robot watchfulness hinders learning performance

Educational technological applications, such as computerized learning environments and robot tutors, are often programmed to provide social cues for the purposes of facilitating natural interaction and enhancing productive outcomes. However, there can be potential costs to social interactions that could run counter to such goals. Here, we present an experiment testing the impact of a watchful versus non-watchful robot tutor on childrens language-learning effort and performance. Across two interaction sessions, children learned French and Latin rules from a robot tutor and filled in worksheets applying the rules to translate phrases. Results indicate better performance on the worksheets in the session in which the robot looked away from, as compared to the session it looked toward the child, as the child was filling in the worksheets. This was the case in particular for the more difficult worksheet items. These findings highlight the need for careful implementation of social robot behaviors to avoid counterproductive effects.

The nature of dialog: structural and lexical markers of dialogic teacher/learner interactions

In this paper I argue that dialog facilitates learning. As a consequence teaching and learning should be dialogic in principal. Against this background the question arises what dialog actually is and how it can be implemented for teaching and learning. A pilot corpus study of a dialog and a monolog corpus of selected teacher/learner interactions sheds light on some of the structural and lexical characteristics of dialogic teaching and learning. The analysis of the data discloses five communicative functions of selected keywords of the dialog corpus, which indicate how speakers are affiliated in dialogic interaction.

Language use and the lexicon

In this article I critically discuss two state-of-the-art theories of meaning in Cognitive Semantics: Evans’ (2006, 2009) LCCM-Theory and Jackendoff’s (2010a, 2010b) Parallel Architecture. The main focus will be on how these theories define meaning and how they represent it. This will serve as a starting point for the introduction of what I have called ‘meaning-in-use’, i.e. an action-theoretical notion of meaning embedded in language use (Feller 2010). Meaning is here construed as something that speakers do in communication, which is closely related to Weigand’s (cf., e.g., 2000, 2010) view of language as language action.