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Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing
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Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing
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As spoken language systems become more conversational in nature, new interfaces are emerging with animated characters that are designed to elicit and manage a conversation with the user. In the present study, the spoken language of ten 6-to-10-year-old children was compared while interacting with an animated character in the I SEE! interface and again while interacting with a human adult. Analyses revealed that 25% of children’s utterances contained disfluencies or idiosyncratic lexical content that would be difficult for a recognizer to process. Children had significantly higher disfluency rates than adults, and a steeper slope in their rate of disfluencies as a function of utterance length. The long-term goal of this research is the development of appropriate and robust conversational interfaces for children.
Bibliographic reference. Oviatt, Sharon (2000): "Talking to thimble jellies: children²s conversational speech with animated characters", In ICSLP-2000, vol.3, 877-880.