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Robot-directed speech: using language to assess first-time users' conceptualizations of a robot Download PDF

ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
Proceeding of the 5th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction, Osaka, Japan Endnote Citation
  • Sarah Kriz University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
  • Gregory Anderson George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
  • J. Gregory Trafton U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, USA

Abstract

It is expected that in the near-future people will have daily natural language interactions with robots. However, we know very little about how users feel they should talk to robots, especially users who have never before interacted with a robot. The present study evaluated first-time users' expectations about a robot's cognitive and communicative capabilities by comparing robot-directed speech to the way in which participants talked to a human partner.


The results indicate that participants spoke more loudly, raised their pitch, and hyperarticulated their messages when they spoke to the robot, suggesting that they viewed the robot as having low linguistic competence. However, utterances show that speakers often assumed that the robot had humanlike cognitive capabilities. The results suggest that while first-time users were concerned with the fragility of the robot's speech recognition system, they believed that the robot had extremely strong information processing capabilities.

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The Pervasiveness of 1/f Scaling in Speech Reflects the Metastable Basis of Cognition. Download PDF
Cognitive Science; Nov2008, Vol. 32 Issue 7, p1217-1231, 15p, 1 Diagram, 6 Graphs Endnote Citation
  • Kello, Christopher T.
  • Anderson, Gregory G.
  • Holden, John G.
  • Van Orden, Guy C.

Abstract

Human neural and behavioral activities have been reported to exhibit fractal dynamics known as "1/f noise," which is more aptly named "1/f scaling." Some argue that 1/f scaling is a general and pervasive property of the dynamical substrate from which cognitive functions are formed. Others argue that it is an idiosyncratic property of domain-specific processes.


An experiment was conducted to investigate whether 1/f scaling pervades the intrinsic fluctuations of a spoken word. Ten participants each repeated the word "bucket" over 1,000 times, and fluctuations in acoustic measurements across repetitions generally followed the 1/f scaling relation, including numerous parallel yet distinct series of 1/f fluctuations. On the basis of work showing that 1/f scaling is a universal earmark of metastability, it is proposed that the observed pervasiveness of 1/f fluctuations in speech reflects the fact that cognitive functions are formed as metastable patterns of activity in brain, body, and environment.

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