Tellimation: Making Narrative Gaps Visible in Children's Storytelling with Just-in-Time Animation
Abstract
Illustrated scenes are used to prompt children's stories, yet children with language difficulties often omit the details, actions, and relationships that make a story coherent. We introduce Tellimation, which animates scene elements a child has omitted or misdescribed, drawing attention to a narrative gap without saying what to tell. Its design space covers eight kinds of gaps (who is in the scene, how many, what they are like, what they are doing, where, when, how they relate, and what lies beyond the picture, such as speech and thoughts), instantiated through 20 parameterized animations grounded in classical animation principles. A real-time pipeline detects discrepancies between utterance and scene, then selects and parameterizes an animation from the scene's narrative potential and the child's history. Adults interpreted most animations without instruction (N=120); children (N=12) resolved 46% of the gaps the system identified with animations, against 13% without.
