Phonetic convergence of children with and without autism in robot interaction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2022/13/0020/000562Keywords:
Phonetic convergence, Human-robot interaction, Children, AutismAbstract
Phonetic convergence is a phenomenon in conversation where the phonetic features of interlocutors become more similar to each other. This study investigated whether children with Autism Spectrum Disorder showed phonetic convergence of vowel formants and speech rate when interacting with a social robot. Their production was compared with that of their typically developing (TD) peers, and the results showed that children with ASD demonstrated convergence of vowel formants comparable to their TD peers. They also showed the capability to perceive changes in the robot’s speech rate and adjust their own speech rate accordingly. It is suggested that the social robot may have socially motivated children with ASD, making them more willing to converge their phonetic features to it compared with a human interlocutor.
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Hogstrom, A., Theodore, R. M., Canfield, A., Castelluccio, B., Green, J., Irvine, C., Eigsti, I. M. 2018. Reduced phonemic convergence in Autism Spectrum Disorder. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1797-1802. Madison, USA.
Wynn, C. J., Borrie, S. A., Sellers, T. P. 2018. Speech rate entrainment in children and adults with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27(3), 965-974.
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Copyright (c) 2022 Hong, Yitian (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
