Regulating Turn-Taking in Multi-child Spoken Interaction

Abstract

We examine the effects of coordinated head and eye movement on children’s turn-taking behavior in the context of a multiparty game. Twenty-two pairs of children competed in a trivia quiz scenario that is moderated first by a human and later by a robot. We quantify the effects of eyes-only and combined head-eye movements on the turn-taking behavior of the children in both directed and open questions (where either child is free to respond to win the point), and compare the results to performance with the human moderator who uses natural head and eye movements as well as additional cues that can be relevant to turn-taking. We find that coordinated head and eye movement in the robot is a significantly more successful cueing strategy than eye movement alone in directed questions, producing turn regulation that is comparable to the human moderator’s more complex behaviors. Further, in open questions, head gaze results in more balanced turn-taking than eye movement alone. Finally, we compare the results for children to comparable studies with adults and discuss the implications for developing computational models of joint-attention in human-agent spoken interactions.