Method for Analyzing Interactions in Pedagogical Environments using Environmental Sound Analysis

This paper addresses sound environments in pedagogical environments. Specifically, the pedagogical field considered in this paper is parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT), a type of therapy aimed at improving parent-child interaction. The sound environment in the field is first measured. Then, using the features of the observed sounds, a state transition model, which represents the flow of the interaction, is calculated to evaluate the interaction between the parent and child. The novel aspect of this approach is that the state transition model is constructed using only features such as loudness and pitch and not the content of the utterances of either the parent or child. A spectrogram is calculated from the state transition model using Fourier synchrosqueezed transform, and the first principal component of the matrix related to the spectrogram is used to obtain indices for evaluating whether the parent-child interaction is positive. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified using parent-child interaction scores provided by PCIT therapists.