Emiel Krahmer

About

Emiel Krahmer is a leading researcher in human-robot interaction and computational linguistics, whose work explores how social robots can serve as effective educational tools, particularly for second language acquisition in young children. His major contributions center on designing and evaluating child-friendly robot tutors that use gestures, adaptive feedback, and anthropomorphic features to enhance vocabulary learning. In a landmark large-scale study (2019, 137 citations), he demonstrated that robot-led tutoring can successfully teach English vocabulary to preschool children over multiple sessions. His research has shown that a robot’s iconic gestures and adaptive scaffolding significantly improve learning outcomes (99 citations), while also investigating how children’s anthropomorphic beliefs about robots relate to word learning (51 citations). Beyond education, Krahmer has examined the perceived credibility of machine-written news (89 citations), contributing to the emerging field of automated journalism. His work on child-robot interaction across cultures (88 citations) and collaborative gameplay (33 citations) has further shaped our understanding of how children engage with social agents. With over 800 total citations across his most influential papers, Krahmer’s research provides foundational insights for designing effective, engaging, and culturally sensitive educational robots.

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
   Journalist versus news consumer : The perceived credibility of machine written news

   89 citations · 2014
6. 6
   Child–robot interaction across cultures: How does playing a game with a social robot compare to playing a game alone or with a friend?

   88 citations · 2014
7. 7
   A toy or a friend? Children's anthropomorphic beliefs about robots and how these relate to second‐language word learning

   51 citations · 2020
8. 8
   The Effects of Feedback on Children's Engagement and Learning Outcomes in Robot-Assisted Second Language Learning

   50 citations · 2020
9. 9
   Varied Human-Like Gestures for Social Robots

   35 citations · 2020
10. 10
    Child-robot interaction during collaborative game play

    33 citations · 2010

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links