The prosody of pet robot directed speech: evidence from children

Abstract

In this paper, we present a database with emotional children’s speech in a human-robot scenario: the children were giving in-structions to Sony’s pet robot dog AIBO, with AIBO showing both obedient and disobedient behaviour. In such a scenario, a specific type of partner-centered interaction can be observed. We aimed at finding prosodic correlates of children’s emotional speech and were interested to see which speech registers chil-dren use when talking to AIBO. For interpretation, we left the weighting and categorization of prosodic features to a statis-tic classifier. The parameters found to be most important were word duration, average energy, variation in pitch and energy, and harmonics-to-noise ratio. The data moreover suggests that the children used a register that resembled mostly child-directed and pet-directed speech and to some extent computer-directed speech. 1.