Caroline Montassier

Université de Rouen Normandie, University of Plymouth

Papers

Total Citations

161

H-Index

About

Caroline Montassier is a leading researcher at the intersection of child-computer interaction and speech technology, with a primary focus on advancing human-robot interaction (HRI) for young users. Her most influential work, "Child Speech Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction" (2017), which has garnered 158 citations, critically examines the challenges of deploying automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems in real-world HRI settings with children. Montassier’s key contribution lies in identifying the significant gap between adult and child speech recognition performance, highlighting how factors like spontaneous speech, pronunciation variability, and limited training data hinder effective robot-child communication. This foundational study has shaped subsequent research by underscoring the need for child-specific acoustic models and interaction design. Additionally, Montassier has contributed valuable resources to the field, including a meticulously curated dataset of English child speech recordings (2016), featuring spontaneous narratives and scripted sentences from 11 children aged 4–5. Though smaller in citation count, this dataset supports reproducibility and further investigation into child speech patterns. Her work is pivotal for developers and researchers aiming to create more inclusive, responsive, and engaging robotic companions for educational and therapeutic applications.