Do We Speak to Robots Looking Like Humans As We Speak to Humans? A Study of Pitch in French Human-Machine and Human-Human Interactions

摘要

Robot-directed speech refers to speech to a robotic device (speakers, computers, etc.). Studies have investigated the phonetic and linguistic properties of this type of speech and shown that, humans tend to change their pitch when talking to a robot vs to a human. Parallelly, it has shown that the anthropomorphism of the devices affects the social aspect of interaction. However, none have investigated the effect of the device’s human-likeliness on linguistic realizations. This study proposes to fill this gap by comparing the effect of anthropomorphism in speech directed at a speaker vs a humanoid robot vs a human by analyzing the F0 values and range in the three conditions, and how these parameters change throughout the conversation. The data from 52 native speakers of French show that robot-directed speech shares several pitch tendencies with speaker-directed speech, which in its turn is situated between human- and robot-directed speech.