Associating children's non-verbal and verbal behaviour: Body movements, emotions, and laughter in a human-robot interaction

In this article, we associate different types of vocal behaviour denoting emotional user states and laughter with different types of body movements such as gestures, forward bends, or liveliness. Our subjects are German children giving commands to Sony's Aibo robot; the data are fully realistic. The analysis reveals characteristic and significant co-occurrences of body movements and vocal events.