The impact of robots language form on people's perception of robots

Abstract

Robots in people's daily life have social relationships with human. This study investigated how the expression of social relationship in human communication is applied to human-robot relationship. We expressed two axes of social relationship through robots' verbal language. In a 2 (address: calling participants' name vs. not calling participants' name) x 2 (speech style: honorific vs. familiar) between-participants experiment (N=60), participants experienced one of four types of the robot and evaluate the robot's friendliness and dominance. Participants rated robots friendlier when it called their name than when it didn't call their name. In the case of robots' dominance, there was no significant difference in whether the robot called participants' name as well as the robot's forms of language. Based on the experiment results, we discussed the use of a social relationship concept for designing robots' dialogue. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.