The expressivity of turn-taking: Understanding children pragmatics by hybrid classifiers

We analyze the effect of children age on pragmatic skills, i.e. on the way children manage the conversation dynamics. In particular, we focus exclusively on the turn-taking (who talks when and how much), reducing conversations as sequences of simple speech/silence periods. Employing a hybrid (generative + discriminative) classification framework, we demonstrate that such a simple signature is very informative, allowing to separate 22 “pre-School” conversations (between 3-4 years old children) and 24 “School” conversations (between 6-8 years old children) subjects, with 78% of accuracy. The framework exploits Steady Conversational Periods and Observed Influence Models as feature extractors, plus LASSO regression as feature selector and classifier. The generative nature of our method permits, as byproduct, to identify the pragmatic skills that better discriminate the two groups: no-tably, scholar children tend to have more frequent periods of sustained conversation, in a statistically significant way.