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Analysing Interactive Competencies 123By moving away from studying vocal behaviour in isolation to focusing onembodied action in its sequential environments, CA can show how a personwith autism engages in social action and orients to others through both verbaland non-verbal resources. Here, using naturalistic data involving activitiesgenerated and supported by a mobile robot we can demonstrate how talk whichmight be classified as perservation or echolalia by a content analytic approachis in fact a pragmatically skilled, socially-oriented activity. The practical benefitof orientation to interactive context lies in developing our understandingof the exact processes involved in interactions that include people with autism,thereby helping service providers to identify the precise site of communicativebreakdowns in order to support focused intervention.3. ConclusionThis chapter discussed two techniques for analysing interaction and communicationof children with autism in trials involving a social robot, work emergingfrom the Aurora project. Ultimately, different quantitative and qualitativeanalysis techniques are necessary to fully assess and appreciate the communicationand interaction competencies of children with autism. Results willprovide us with valuable guidelines for the systematic development of the designof the robot, its behaviour and interaction skills, and the design of the trialsessions.AcknowledgmentsThe AURORA project is supported by an EPSRC grant (GR/M62648), Applied AI SystemsInc. and the teaching staff at Radlett Lodge School.Notes1. The autistic disorder is defined by specific diagnostic criteria, specified in DSM-IV (Diagnostic andStatistical Manual of Mental Disorders, American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Individuals with autismshow a broad spectrum of difficulties and abilities, and vary enormously in their levels of overall intellectualfunctioning [6]. However, all individuals diagnosed with autism will show impairments in communicationand social interaction skills.2. The analysis of the videotapes focuses on the child. However, since we are trying to promote socialinteraction and communication, the presence of other people is not ignored, rather examined from theperspective of the child.3. Previous results with four children were published in [16], [17].References[1] Kerstin Dautenhahn and Iain Werry. Issues of robot-human interaction dynamics in therehabilitation of children with autism. In J.-A. Meyer, A. Berthoz, D. Floreano, H. Roitblat,and S. W. Wilson, editors, Proc. From animals to animats 6, The Sixth InternationalConference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB2000), pages 519–528, 2000.