MSCA ITN Early Language Development in the Digital Age (e-LADDA)

Modern digital technologies are transforming rapidly the environment in which children are growing up and developing skills. This new digital reality has both changed the nature of the linguistic input provided to young children, but also affords new ways of interaction with communication agents, such as tablets and robots.

The goal of e-LADDA is to establish whether the new and intuitive interactions afforded by digital tools impact on young children’s language development and language outcomes in a positive or adverse way. We further aim to identify exactly what factors in both the technology itself and the communication channel advance language learning and growth or may impede it.

This goal will be pursued in e-LADDA from a highly interdisciplinary and cross-sectorial perspective, bridging between research disciplines and methodologies and in collaboration with industry and the non-academic public sector.

At KTH (ESR 14), we will develop a novel theoretical framework for multi-modal child robot interaction for language teaching in typically developing children and children with ASD, and a language-teaching application for robots that can interact continuously with children, and perform speech recognition, engagement, perspective taking, tracking of a child’s learning progress, face and gaze detection.

Publications

Researchers

Funding

European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions grant agreement No. 857897

Duration

April 2021 → April 2024