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Title: The Impact of Multi-character Story Distribution and Gesture on Children's Engagement
Effective storytelling relies on engagement and interaction. This work develops an automated software platform for telling stories to children and investigates the impact of two design choices on children’s engagement and willingness to interact with the system: story distribution and the use of complex gesture. A storyteller condition compares stories told in a third person, narrator voice with those distributed between a narrator and first-person story characters. Basic gestures are used in all our storytellings, but, in a second factor, some are augmented with gestures that indicate conversational turn changes, references to other characters and prompt children to ask questions. An analysis of eye gaze indicates that children attend more to the story when a distributed storytelling model is used. Gesture prompts appear to encourage children to ask questions, something that children did, but at a relatively low rate. Interestingly, the children most frequently asked “why” questions. Gaze switching happened more quickly when the story characters began to speak than for narrator turns. These results have implications for future agent-based storytelling system research.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1748056
PAR ID:
10206442
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling
Page Range / eLocation ID:
128-143
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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