Interactive robots are used increasingly not only in entertainment and service robotics, but also in rehabilitation, therapy and education. The work presented in this paper is part of the Aurora project, rooted in assistive technology and robot-human interaction research. Our primary aim is to study if robots can potentially be used as therapeutically or educationally useful 'toys' . In this paper we outline the aims of the project that this study belongs to, as well as the specific qualitative contextual perspective that is being used. We then provide an in-depth evaluation, in part using Conversation Analysis (CA), of segments of trials where three children with autism interacted with a robot as well as an adult. We focus our analysis primarily on joint attention which plays a fundamental role in human development and social understanding. Joint attention skills of children with autism have been studied extensively in autism research and therefore this behaviour provides a relevant focus for our study. In the setting used, joint attention emerges from natural and spontaneous interactions between a child and an adult. We present the data in the form of transcripts and photo stills. The examples were selected from extensive video footage for illustrative purposes, i.e. demonstrating how children with autism can respond to the changing behaviour of their co-participant, i.e. the experimenter. Furthermore, our data shows that the robot provides a salient object, or mediator for joint attention. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications of this work in the context of further studies with robots and children with autism within the Aurora project, as well as the potential contribution of robots to research into the nature of autism.

Although Helen has limited verbal resources she is more interactionally competent than this may initially suggest. We propose that these repetition practices may constitute an adaptation to interacting with a limited lexicon. We discuss the relevance of Conversational Analysis for understanding autistic children's pragmatic competence, and the implications for remediation and further research.

Games between staff and people with intellectual disabilities serve to promote social engagement and inclusion. However, when the person has limited and idiosyncratic communicative abilities, it may be hard to gauge what his/her own view of the matter is. We examine video-taped records of two episodes in which a staff member of a group home prompted a resident with profound intellectual disabilities to play a verbal and a non-verbal 'game'. We examine how the staff member in these two cases designs her actions to solve the dilemma she faces between, on the one hand, abandoning an activity when the resident does not provide clear indications that she/he wants to continue or, on the other hand, persisting with it until the resident begins to enjoy it or, at least, participate more fully. The solution lies in a pervasive institutional practice: treat resistance or ambiguity as temporary reluctance. We discuss these interactions as examples of how principles of empowerment, inclusion and independence play out in the details of everyday interaction.

Some higher functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are reported to produce perseverative talk, especially around 'special interests'. Topic perseveration is a form of pragmatic impairment captured in Prizant and Rydell's (1993) continuum of unconventional verbal behaviour in autism. Although widely reported, there is little systematic empirical research into this phenomenon. This paper considers the utility of Conversation Analysis in developing knowledge in this area, drawing upon data involving a boy with an ASD interacting with a researcher and a mobile robot platform. Although a frequency analysis of the boy's talk on a single topic may suggest that it is perseverative in nature, in a sequential analysis of both talk and non-spoken activities this study aims to show how these may be interactionally-embedded. It is suggested that, in considering the interactional salience of apparently perseverative talk, it can be useful to explore the participation framework in which the topic is revisited.