Bilingual children have unique needs for school readiness as they navigate between two languages and cultures. A supportive home language environment, where children are frequently exposed to language through conversation and reading, can positively impact their language development and prepare them for school. However, current conversational agents and e-books designed for children do not typically take into account the cultural and linguistic needs of bilingual children and do not involve parents. This project presents the development of a bilingual conversational agent and accompanying e-book, designed to support parent-child interactions and promote language development for Latinx Spanish-English bilingual children. Results from a user study indicate that the bilingual agent effectively engages children verbally and encourages parental involvement in reading processes. The study also provides design insights for creating conversational agents for bilingual children.

Video programs are important, accessible educational resources for young children, especially those from an under-resourced backgrounds. These programs’ potential can be amplified if children are allowed to socially interact with media characters during their video watching. This paper presents the design and empirical investigation of interactive science-focused videos in which the main character, powered by a conversational agent, engaged in contingent conversation with children by asking children questions and providing responsive feedback. We found that children actively interacted with the media character in the conversational videos and their parents spontaneously provided support in the process. We also found that the children who watched the conversational video performed better in the immediate, episode-specific science assessment compared to their peers who watched the broadcast, non-interactive version of the same episode. Several design implications are discussed for using conversational technologies to better support child active learning and parent involvement in video watching.