Ora Oudgenoeg‐Paz

About

Ora Oudgenoeg-Paz is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of educational technology, child development, and linguistics, with a particular focus on robot-assisted language learning (RALL) and second language acquisition in young children. Her work has fundamentally shaped how the field understands the potential of social robots as language tutors, most notably through her widely cited 2018 review, "Social Robots for Language Learning" (356 citations), which provided a comprehensive map of this rapidly emerging field. Alongside her landmark guidelines paper (160 citations), she established foundational frameworks for designing effective robot-based second language interventions. Oudgenoeg-Paz has led large-scale empirical studies demonstrating that social robots can meaningfully support young children's English vocabulary acquisition, while also probing the nuances behind this effectiveness — examining how children's anthropomorphic beliefs, individual learning differences, non-verbal cues, and engagement levels all moderate learning outcomes. Her innovative work on multilingual support, such as programming robots to deliver first-language translations for Turkish-Dutch children, highlights her commitment to educational equity. With over 800 cumulative citations, her research has become essential reading for educators, roboticists, and linguists working to harness technology in service of early childhood language development.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Social Robots for Language Learning: A Review

   356 citations · 2018
2. 2
   Guidelines for Designing Social Robots as Second Language Tutors

   160 citations · 2018
3. 3
   Second Language Tutoring Using Social Robots: A Large-Scale Study

   137 citations · 2019
4. 4
   A toy or a friend? Children's anthropomorphic beliefs about robots and how these relate to second‐language word learning

   51 citations · 2020
5. 5
   Engagement in longitudinal child-robot language learning interactions: Disentangling robot and task engagement

   31 citations · 2022
6. 6
   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
7. 7
   Individual Differences in Children’s (Language) Learning Skills Moderate Effects of Robot-Assisted Second Language Learning

   14 citations · 2021
8. 8
   Investigating the Effects of a Robot Peer on L2 Word Learning

   14 citations · 2018
9. 9
   Children’s reliance on the non-verbal cues of a robot versus a human

   8 citations · 2019
10. 10
    Designing and Evaluating Iconic Gestures for Child-Robot Second Language Learning

    7 citations · 2021

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links