Hebrew roots and patterns: developing early childhood morphological knowledge through an oral teaching methodology & social robots

The root extraction process and an active ability to manipulate morphemes in a morphologically dense language such as Hebrew is important for children’s literacy, spelling, and deep understanding of the language. However, explicit knowledge of roots in early grades is largely based on the orthographic representations of the root that are taught and tested in school mainly through written assignments and textbooks. We report on an experiment that reveals how the integration of social robot teachers and a novel methodology that utilizes an oral representation of the Hebrew root can improve young children’s ability to extract roots. After 3–5 learning sessions with the robots, young children, ages 5–9, were able to dramatically improve their extraction across a variety of verb and noun patterns. Not only were they answering more correct items and leaving less items unanswered after the intervention, but younger children (ages 5–6) with less prior knowledge were able to close the gap in root extraction that was significant before the learning. Furthermore, our analysis helps identify a less traditional difficulty order of verbal and nominal patterns which suggests that, for children, noun patterns are not inherently more difficult to extract roots from than verb patterns.