We report results of a study in which a low cost sociable robot was immersed at an Early Childhood Education Center for a period of 2 weeks. The study was designed to investigate whether the robot, which operated fully autonomously during the intervention period, could improve target vocabulary skills of 18-24 month of age toddlers. The results showed a 27 % improvement in knowledge of the target words taught by the robot when compared to a matched set of control words. The results suggest that sociable robots may be an effective and low cost technology to enrich Early Childhood Education environments.
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Movellan et al. (2009) studied this question.