Mirjam de Haas

About

Mirjam de Haas is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction, child development, and second language acquisition, whose work has fundamentally shaped how we understand social robots as educational tools. Her research focuses on designing and evaluating robot tutors that help young children learn foreign language vocabulary, with a particular emphasis on preschool-age learners navigating second language environments. De Haas's most influential contributions include establishing foundational design guidelines for social robots as language tutors (160 citations) and conducting large-scale empirical studies demonstrating their real-world effectiveness (137 citations). Her work systematically examines how robot behaviors — including iconic gestures, adaptive feedback, and first-language translations — can scaffold children's learning in meaningful ways. Notably, she has investigated the psychological dimensions of child-robot relationships, exploring how children's tendency to anthropomorphize robots relates to their learning outcomes, and how socially grounded strategies can strengthen child-robot bonds. Spanning longitudinal studies, multilingual classroom contexts, and developmental considerations such as age-related engagement differences, her research portfolio accumulates over 700 citations and offers both theoretical frameworks and practical guidance for educators and technologists alike. De Haas's work represents an essential foundation for anyone seeking to deploy social robots meaningfully in diverse, real-world educational settings.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Guidelines for Designing Social Robots as Second Language Tutors

   160 citations · 2018
2. 2
   Second Language Tutoring Using Social Robots: A Large-Scale Study

   137 citations · 2019
3. 3
   Child-Robot Interactions for Second Language Tutoring to Preschool Children

   125 citations · 2017
4. 4
   The Effect of a Robot's Gestures and Adaptive Tutoring on Children's Acquisition of Second Language Vocabularies

   99 citations · 2018
5. 5
   A toy or a friend? Children's anthropomorphic beliefs about robots and how these relate to second‐language word learning

   51 citations · 2020
6. 6
   The Effects of Feedback on Children's Engagement and Learning Outcomes in Robot-Assisted Second Language Learning

   50 citations · 2020
7. 7
   Engagement in longitudinal child-robot language learning interactions: Disentangling robot and task engagement

   31 citations · 2022
8. 8
   Socially grounded game strategy enhances bonding and perceived smartness of a humanoid robot

   27 citations · 2017
9. 9
   Teaching <scp>Turkish‐Dutch</scp> kindergartners Dutch vocabulary with a social robot: Does the robot's use of Turkish translations benefit children's Dutch vocabulary learning?

   26 citations · 2020
10. 10
    The Effect of Age on Engagement in Preschoolers' Child-Robot Interactions

    16 citations · 2017

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links