@inproceedings { yadollahi18, abstract = {This paper describes research aimed at supporting children’sreading practices using a robot designed to interact withchildren as their reading companion. We use a learning byteaching scenario in which the robot has a similar or lowerreading level compared to children, and needs help andextra practice to develop its reading skills. The interactionis structured with robot reading to the child and sometimesmaking mistakes as the robot is considered to be in thelearning phase. Child corrects the robot by giving it instantfeedbacks. To understand what kind of behavior can be moreconstructive to the interaction especially in helping the child,we evaluated the effect of a deictic gesture, namely pointingon the child’s ability to find reading mistakes made by therobot. We designed three types of mistakes correspondingto different levels of reading mastery. We tested our systemin a within-subject experiment with 16 children. We splitchildren into a high and low reading proficiency even-thoughthey were all beginners. For the high reading proficiencygroup, we observed that pointing gestures were beneficialfor recognizing some types of mistakes that the robot made.For the earlier stage group of readers pointing were helping tofind mistakes that were raised upon a mismatch between textand illustrations. However, surprisingly, for this same group ofchildren, the deictic gestures were disturbing in recognizingmismatches between text and meaning.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children}, keywords = {Social Robotic Companions;}, pages = {195--206}, title = {When deictic gestures in a robot can harm child-robot collaboration}, year = {2018}, author = {Elmira Yadollahi and Wafa Johal and Ana Paiva and Pierre Dillenbourg} }

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