The effect of a social robot mediator on speech characteristics of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

In the current investigation, we used a single case alternating treatments design to examine the effects of a robot prompter on the characteristics of vocal utterances in six children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Across two alternating conditions, robot prompting (RP) and no robot prompting...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shah, Aamira, Kondaurova, Maria, Mishra, Ruchik, Pennington, Robert, Welch, Karla C.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Online Access:Request full text
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Summary:In the current investigation, we used a single case alternating treatments design to examine the effects of a robot prompter on the characteristics of vocal utterances in six children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Across two alternating conditions, robot prompting (RP) and no robot prompting (NRP) we measured participants mean length of utterances in morphemes (MLU) and the type-token ratio (TTR) as a degree of lexical variation. Our findings demonstrated that children who produced a high overall MLU demonstrated a decreased MLU in the RP condition compared to the NRP condition. Children who produced a low overall MLU had a higher MLU in the RP compared to the NRP condition. No differences in children’s TTR during RP and NRP conditions were found. The results suggest that the use of a social robot prompter positively affects the morphosyntactic complexity of speech in children with ASD, however, large individual variability was observed.
ISSN:1939-800X
DOI:10.1121/2.0001747