‘Uhm... Are you sure?’ An Exploratory Study of Trust Indicators in Robot-Directed Child Speech

In order to calibrate children’s trust in robots toward appropriate levels in the interaction, reliable trust measures are necessary. Current trust measures are not suitable for measuring children’s trust in a real-time manner. While speech from adult speakers has proven to contain information on their trust, this paper presents a first exploration investigating whether these results hold up in the context of a child-robot interaction. Fifty-eight conversations between children and robots were recorded (N=29), evoking high and low trust moments in the interaction. Correlation tests showed no (strong) predictors of children’s trust in their speech. Limitations and possibilities of how to advance the investigations of an automatic trust measure for child-robot interaction are discussed.