An acoustic analysis of shared enjoyment in ECA interactions of children with autism

The quality of shared enjoyment in interactions is a key aspect related to Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This paper discusses two types of enjoyment: the first refers to humorous events and is associated with one´s positive affective state and the second is used to facilitate social interactions between people. These types of shared enjoyment are objectively specified by their proximity to a voiced and unvoiced laughter instance, respectively. The goal of this work is to study the acoustic differences of areas surrounding the two kinds of shared enjoyment instances, called “social zones”, using data collected from children with autism, and their parents, interacting with an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA). A classification task was performed to predict whether a “social zone” surrounds a voiced or an unvoiced laughter instance. Our results indicate that humorous events are more easily recognized than events acting as social facilitators and that related speech patterns vary more across children compared to other interlocutors.