Investigating the Influence of Virtual Peers as Dialect Models on Students’ Prosodic Inventory

<p>Children who speak non-standard dialects of English show reduced performance not just in language-oriented topics in school but also in math and science. Technological solutions have been rare exactly because of the nonmainstream nature of their talk, and hence the difficulty in automatically recognizing their speech and responding to it with, for example, computer tutors. In order to work towards overcoming this achievement gap, in this work we investigate African American students’ prosodic inventories in different contexts as a first-step towards building a system that will be able to automatically recognize, and respond to, the dialect in which a child is speaking. We presented children with recordings of a peer (confederate) speaking in either African American English (AAE) or Mainstream American English (MAE) during both a social task and a science task. We found that children showed decreased prosodic variation and peak slopes during speech segments which did not contain AAE features, resulting in more monotone and breathy utterances than when they are speaking in AAE. We also found that children who were speaking with a “peer” who uses AAE have increased articulation rates, energy, and pitch variation. We discuss potential interpretations of these results that are important to the design of a system to support linguistic diversity and decrease the achievement gap.</p

“Love ya, jerkface”: using Sparse Log-Linear Models to Build Positive (and Impolite) Relationships with Teens

<p>One challenge of implementing spoken dialogue systems for long-term interaction is how to adapt the dialogue as user and system become more familiar. We believe this challenge includes evoking and signaling aspects of long-term relationships such as rapport. For tutoring systems, this may additionally require knowing how relationships are signaled among non-adult users. We therefore investigate conversational strategies used by teenagers in peer tutoring dialogues, and how these strategies function differently among friends or strangers. In particular, we use annotated and automatically extracted linguistic devices to predict impoliteness and positivity in the next turn. To take into account the sparse nature of these features in real data we use models including Lasso, ridge estimator, and elastic net. We evaluate the predictive power of our models under various settings, and compare our sparse models with standard non-sparse solutions. Our experiments demonstrate that our models are more accurate than non-sparse models quantitatively, and that teens use unexpected kinds of language to do relationship work such as signaling rapport, but friends and strangers, tutors and tutees, carry out this work in quite different ways from one another.</p

Beyond single-mindedness: A figure-ground reversal for the cognitive sciences

A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co-constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting minds. All around the cognitive sciences, there are approaches that put interaction center stage. Their diverse and pluralistic origins may obscure the fact that collectively, they harbor insights and methods that can respecify foundational assumptions and fuel novel interdisciplinary work. What might the cognitive sciences gain from stronger interactional foundations? This represents, we believe, one of the key questions for the future. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the classic cognitive science hexagon and beyond, we highlight the opportunity for a figure-ground reversal that puts interaction at the heart of cognition. The interactive stance is a way of seeing that deserves to be a key part of the conceptual toolkit of cognitive scientists