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122 Socially Intelligent Agentsautism. For example, ‘Echolalia’ [7], (which can be immediate or delayed)is typically conceptualised as talk which precisely reproduces, or echoes, previouslyoverheard talk constituting an inappropriate utterance in the assumedcommunicative context. Likewise ‘Perservation’ or inappropriate topic maintenanceis also understood as a symptom of autism. Despite more recent developmentsthat have considered echolalia’s capacity to achieve communicativegoals [10] and have raised the potential relevance of conversation analysisin exploring this issue [19] the majority of autism researchers treat theecholalic or perservative talk of children with autism as symptomatic of underlyingpathology.In our data Chris makes ten similar statements about the robot’s poor steeringability such as “not very good at ^steering its:el:f ”. In a content analysiseven a quite specific category ‘child comments on poor steering ability’ wouldpull these ten utterances into a single category leaving us likely to concludethat Chris’s contribution is ‘perseverative’ or alternatively ‘delayed-echolalic’.However a CA perspective provides a more finely honed approach allowing usto pay attention to the distinct form of each utterance, its specific embeddingin the interactional sequence and concurrent synchronous movement and gesture.For example extract 2 in figure 14.3 shows how one of Chris’s “not verygood at ^steering it[s:el:f” statements (line 3) is clearly responsive to the robotapproaching, but going past him (line 2).Chris also makes seven, apparently repetitious, statements about the robotbeing in a certain “mood” in the course of a 27 second interval. Three of theseare shown in Extract 3 in figure 14.3 (in lines 2, 6 and 8). Chris’s utterance inline 2 follows a number of attempts by him to establish that an LCD panel onthe back of robot (the “it” in line 2) tells one about the “mood” of the robot(an issue for the participants here apparently being the appropriateness of theterm “mood”, as opposed to “programme”). By moving himself (in line 3) andcharacterising the robot’s tracking movements (from lines 3 - 5) as evidencefor the robot being in a “following mood” (line 6) Chris is able to use therobot’s tracking movements as a kind of practical demonstration of what hemeans when he refers to “mood”. In this way, rather than being an instanceof ‘inappropriate’ repetition, the comment about mood (line 6) firstly involvesa change from talking about the LCD panel to making a relevant observationabout the robot’s immediate behaviour, secondly it apparently addresses aninteractionally relevant issue about the meaning of word “mood”. Incidentally,it can be noted that the repetition of line 6 which occurs in line 8 also has goodinteractional reasons. Line 6 elicits a kind of muted laugh from E – a responsethat does not demonstrably display E’s understanding of C’s prior utterance.C therefore undertakes self-repair in line 8, repeating his characterisation, andthis time securing a fuller response from E “yes it is” (in line 9).