Abstract
Emphasis, by means of either pitch accents or beat gestures (rhythmic co-verbal gestures with no semantic meaning), has been shown to serve two main purposes in human communication: syntactic disambiguation and salience. To use beat gestures in this role, interlocutors must be able to integrate them with the speech they accompany. Whether such integration is possible when the multi-modal communication information is produced by a humanoid robot, and whether it is as efficient as for human communicators, are questions that need to be answered to further understanding of the efficacy of humanoid robots for naturalistic human-like communication. Here, we present an experiment which, using a fully within subjects design, shows that there is a marked difference in speech and gesture integration between human and robot communicators, being significantly less effective for the robot. In contrast to beat gestures, the effects of speech emphasis are the same whether that speech is played through a robot or as part of a video of a human. Thus, while integration of speech emphasis and verbal information do occur for robot communicators, integration of non-informative beat gestures and verbal information does not, despite comparable timing and motion profiles to human gestures. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems—human factors, software psychology; H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces—evalua-tion/methodology, user-centered design
Highlights
Humanoid robots are thought to have a number of advantages over non-humanoid robots, one of which is the possibility of communicating with a person in a naturalistic manner, i.e., in a way that is intuitively understood by humans without learning processes
Evaluation of participant responses is measured by means of proportion of high attachment responses, i.e., proportion of responses in each condition where the first noun was selected as the subject of the relative clause
Using a within-subject design, we show in this paper that speech emphasis has a similar impact on speech understanding from a human or robot performer; emphasising the value of prosody for robot communication
Summary
Humanoid robots are thought to have a number of advantages over non-humanoid robots, one of which is the possibility of communicating with a person in a naturalistic manner, i.e., in a way that is intuitively understood by humans without learning processes. In human-human communication studies, emphasis, by means of either pitch accents or beat gestures (rhythmic coverbal gestures with no semantic meaning), has been shown to serve two main purposes: to provide information as to the intended meaning and syntactic structure in otherwise ambiguous sentences [20], and to indicate which elements of the speech are salient to the speaker [8]. Conveyance of such paralinguistic information makes communications more efficient and effective [22]. A similar result has been found for other types of sentences [30][7]
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