ArticuLab
School of Communication slash School of Engineering at Northwestern University

Other Projects: JR Summit | NUMACK | Collaborative Storytelling | Virtual Peers and Autism | Literacy Skills for African American Children

Storytelling with a virtual peer as an intervention for children with autism

Sam Waving Children spend their time playing with friends, making up stories, and letting their imaginations run wild as they make up scenarios for their toys. Although this is our vision of a carefree childhood, these activities also lay the groundwork for school-based learning of literacy and later academic and social achievement. Our previous work on Story Listening System in general, and Sam specifically, has demonstrated how we can use these imaginative play and narrative abilities in technology to facilitate learning. Click here for publications.

However, Children with autism, and related pervasive developmental disorders, can lack the appropriate communication skills, social skills, and behaviors such as imaginative play that make such activities possible; this means they are also missing out on opportunities for learning. Children with autism also have difficulty constructing a narrative so it is understandable by other people. Many researchers believe these social interaction and narrative difficulties are due to deficits in theory of mind. We have found in our work on Story Listening Systems with normally developing children that not only do their emergent literacy skills improve, but we have also found that social interaction with their peers also improves. Our goal is to create a new SLS system that incorporates story authoring features, and will leverage the benefits of interactive narrative to help children with autism develop social skills. This new system will enable children with autism to interact with a virtual peer, and also then create and control the communication behaviors of virtual peers as a way of scaffolding social interaction and language skills with people.

This project has three goals:
1. Study children with autism's collaborative storytelling behaviors.
2. Design and build a story listening system with story authoring features for children with autism.
3. Evaluate the design of the system and the effects of the intervention on narrative and social skills in children with autism.