Developing a teacher agent to explore the role of gaze direction on young school children’s comprehension

Teachers’ gaze and school children’s language proficiency play a role for listening comprehension in the classroom. The influence of multimodal conditions on listening comprehension may be hard to study in a systematic manner with real speakers. The aim was to test the concept and feasibility of studying the influence of a speakers on passage comprehension performance in children using a digitally animated character. Twenty-four primary-school children were tested. A narrative passage was presented to the participants by a teacher agent. Half of the participants were randomized to a direct gaze condition and half to an averted gaze condition. The method is feasible with the intended population. We detected no differences in listening comprehension of the teacher agent’s gaze behavior in our sample. The concept works and it is feasible to test the effect of speaker gaze on children using the proposed methodology with some further development.