Fruit Carts: A Domain and Corpus for Research in Dialogue Systems and Psycholinguistics.

We describe a novel domain, Fruit Carts, aimed at eliciting human language production for the twin purposes of (a) dialogue system research and development and (b) psycholinguistic research. Fruit Carts contains five tasks: choosing a cart, placing it on a map, painting the cart, rotating the cart, and filling the cart with fruit. Fruit Carts has been used for research in psycholinguistics and in dialogue systems. Based on these experiences, we discuss how well the Fruit Carts domain meets four desired features: unscripted, context-constrained, controllable difficulty, and separability into semi-independent subdialogues. We describe the domain in sufficient detail to allow others to replicate it; researchers interested in using the corpora themselves are encouraged to contact the authors directly.

Speech-and-gesture integration in high functioning autism.

This study examined iconic gesture comprehension in autism, with the goal of assessing whether cross-modal processing difficulties impede speech-and-gesture integration. Participants were 19 adolescents with high functioning autism (HFA) and 20 typical controls matched on age, gender, verbal IQ, and socio-economic status (SES). Gesture comprehension was assessed via quantitative analyses of visual fixations during a video-based task, using the visual world paradigm. Participants' eye movements were recorded while they watched videos of a person describing one of four shapes shown on a computer screen, using speech-and-gesture or speech-only descriptions. Participants clicked on the shape that the speaker described. Since gesture naturally precedes speech, earlier visual fixations to the target shape during speech-and-gesture compared to speech-only trials, would suggest immediate integration of auditory and visual information. Analyses of eye movements supported this pattern in control participants but not in individuals with autism: iconic gestures facilitated comprehension in typical individuals, while it hindered comprehension in those with autism. Cross-modal processing difficulties in autism were not accounted for by impaired unimodal speech or gesture processing. The results have important implications for the treatment of children and adults with this disorder.