Vocal turn-taking patterns in groups of children performing collaborative tasks: an exploratory study

Since children (5-9 years old) are still developing their emotional and social skills, their social interactional behaviors in small groups might differ from adults’ interactional behaviors. In order to develop a robot that is able to support children performing collaborative tasks in small groups, it is necessary to gain a better understanding of how children interact with each other. We were interested in investigating vocal turn-taking patterns as we expect these to reveal relations to collaborative and conflict behaviors, especially with children behaviors as previous literature suggests. To that end, we collected an audiovisual corpus of children performing collaborative tasks together in groups of three. Through automatic turn-taking analyses, our results showed that speaker changes with overlaps are more common than without overlaps and children seemed to show smoother turn-taking patterns, i.e., less frequent and longer lasting speaker changes, during collaborative than conflict behaviors.