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The Auditory System 103

interaction with caregivers (Stern et al., 1982). Using punctuated words in this manner gives
greater precision to the human caregiver’s ability to issue reinforcement, thereby improving
the quality of instructive feedback to the robot.

7.8 Summary

Human speech provides a natural and intuitive interface both for communicating with hu-
manoid robots as well as for teaching them. We have implemented and demonstrated a fully
integrated system whereby a humanoid robot recognizes and affectively responds to praise,
prohibition, attention, and comfort in robot-directed speech. These affective intents are
well-matched to human-style instruction scenarios since praise, prohibition, and directing
the robot’s attention to relevant aspects of a task could be intuitively used to train a robot.
Communicative efficacy has been tested and demonstrated with the robot’s caregivers as
well as with naive subjects. I have argued how such an integrated approach lends robustness
to the overall classification performance. Importantly, I have discovered some intriguing
social dynamics that arise between robot and human when expressive feedback is intro-
duced. This expressive feedback plays an important role in facilitating natural and intuitive
human-robot communication.