Age-related Differences in Children's Associations and Preferences for a Robot's Gender
Abstract
In order to establish social and bonding relationships with children, robots need to be able to adapt to a variety of users of different age and gender groups in order to keep them engaged and motivated. To this end, this research examines the responses of 107 children, ages 5 to 12, who interacted with humanoid robot NAO that communicated with synthesized female and male voices. Our results show young children (ages 5 to 8) were not able to successfully attribute gender to the robot in correspondence with the synthesized voice. In addition, we explicitly investigated children»s preferences for the robot»s gender: younger children indicated their preference for a robot with a matching gender while there was no difference in preferences for a robot»s gender by older children (ages 9 to 12).
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Users have often personified voice assistants in smart speakers such as Alexa and have attributed the agent to be a 'companion' or 'friend'.
“Collectively, this background work highlights that users have often personified voice assistants in smart speakers such as Alexa and have attributed the agent to be a “companion” or “friend”.”
From "Phantom Friend" or "Just a Box with Information": Personification and Ontological Categorization of Smart Speaker-based Voice Assistants by Older Adults (2019) · cites this paper as [62]
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Self-citationInvestigating the Impact of Gender Segregation within Observational Pretend Play Interaction
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Neither “Hear” Nor “Their”: Interrogating Gender Neutrality in Robots
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FARIA, E. G., Pinto, A., Oliveira, S. A. D. S., Assunção, G., & Menezes, P. J. (2026) · International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1080/10447318.2026.2643350
- Authors
- Sandygulova, A., & O'Hare, G. M.
- Affiliations
- Nazarbayev University (KZ)
- University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
- ORCID
- Sandygulova, Anara
- Venue
- Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2018-03
- Pages
- 235-236
- OpenAlex
- W2794416129
- Cited by
- 6
- References
- 11
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 1 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 0.90
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (publishedVersion)
- Nazarbayev University Repository (Nazarbayev University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › AI in Service Interactions
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
- Keywords
- child age differences, gender attribution, synthetic speech, humanoid robots, NAO robot, children's preferences, human-robot interaction, gender matching
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