Talking to thimble jellies: children²s conversational speech with animated characters

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-10year-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.