Page 138 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Analysing Interactive Competencies 121

a greeting” unless it occurs in a specific location, namely in certain opening
turns in an interaction ([12], vol. 2, p.36, p.188).
It is the capacity to address the organisation of embodied action,which
makes CA particularly relevant for examining robot-child interactions. In ad-
dition to examining vocal resources for interaction, CA has also been applied
to body movement (in a somewhat different way to the pioneering work of
Kendon, [8]), e.g. [3]). It has also been applied to interactions with, or in-
volving, non-human artifacts (such as computers [2]). We aim to provide a
brief illustration of the relevance of CA to examining both the interactional
competencies of children with autism and their interactions with the robot by
sketching some details from a preliminary analysis of an eight minute session
involving one boy, Chris (C), the robot (R) and a researcher (E).
Whilst pragmatic communicative competence is not traditionally attributed
to people with autism (indeed the iconic image of the Autist is that of being
isolated and self-absorbed) attention to the autistic child’s activities in their
interactional context can reveal communicative competence which might oth-
erwise be missed. It can be established that when the context is considered,
many of Chris’s actions (vocal and non-vocal) can be seen to be responsive to
things that the robot does. For example at one point Chris emits a surprised
exclamation “oooh!”. Extract 1 in figure 14.3 shows that this is evidently re-
sponsive to a sudden approach from the robot.

Figure 14.3. Extracts of transcriptions.

This attention to sequential organisation can provide a refreshing perspec-
tive on some of the ‘communication deficits’ often thought characteristic of