Vaucelle, C. "Dolltalk: A computational toy to enhance narrative perspective-taking"

Abstract

School curricula are designed with the expectation that students achieve literacy. They usually support the acquisition of language by encouraging students to learn how to decode information within a sentence. In this thesis it is suggested that literacy skills in children five to seven years of age can be obtained with a broader understanding of language and its representation. Oral storytelling is presented as a way to develop meta-cognitive skills with a focus on character-based narrative where children must create the perspectives of the characters. The ability to tell stories is common to children from every community and can help them in school performance. Children should therefore be encouraged to express their understanding of character perspectives in oral storytelling.

This thesis presents a tangible interface that allows children to practice preliteracy skills using oral language. It introduces Dolltalk, a system that facilitates children's ability to take narrative perspectives through the mechanism of reporting speech. The toy presented works by asking children to tell stories and by playing back the stories to the child using narrative features. The ability to express the way the characters think and feel in a narrative and what motivates them to act has been shown to be predictive of academic competence among preschool children. A user study was conducted to understand the short-term effect of Dolltalk on children's elaboration of internal states of story characters. The results show that playing with Dolltalk encourages children to introduce their characters in the story and to express the internal states of their characters much more than with the use of a simple tape recorder. The results also show that playing with the current version of Dolltalk or with Dolltalk in tape-recorder mode encourages children to provide spatial and temporal information in their stories much more than they would without hearing any playback of their stories. This thesis presents significant results (p =.04) that indicate the current version of Dolltalk encourages children to express the internal states of their characters.