Talking in color: imaging helps social skills

By David Lawsky

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Karrie Karahalios can show a child with Asperger's Syndrome when he's lost in a conversational riff or a taciturn spouse when he doesn't speak very much.

Their voice appears on a computer terminal as vibrant colors -- red, yellow, blue, green -- the image growing in size if the voice gets louder, overlapping another color as it interrupts or abruptly narrowing with silence.

They are talking in color.

Karahalios, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has devised a way to digitize conversations and spit them back as images that let people "see" their own conversations on computer monitors.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained professor says her method provides feedback in real time and can act as a type of social mirror, allowing people to adjust their speech in the same way they adjust their appearance before a glass mirror.

"You look into a mirror and you change your dress, your expression, because you see exactly how it's happening in real time," she said.

The colors linger so people can see the progression of an entire conversation, not only the present moment.

The computer program, which she calls a "conversation clock," has been tested with low-functioning autistic children and in marriage counseling and is being prepared for use with Asperger's Syndrome.

People with that disorder, at the high end of the autism spectrum, often have sophisticated vocabularies but troubled social interactions.

"Kids with Asperger's tend to do 'monologuing' and 'lecturing'" without letting others intervene," said Maria Dixon, a clinical instructor in hearing and speech at the University of Maryland.

"The challenge is to get them visual feedback while this is happening."

The experiment will use the conversation clock program with two children sitting across from each other at a table.

It will show if children with Asperger's do what other users of the clock tend to do -- change their conversational patterns to balance the colors that appear on the computer screen. That would put an end to monologuing, at least during the experiment.

"My older son is fascinated, because he thinks this could really help him," said psycholinguist Sara Weyland, Dixon's colleague and the mother of two children with Asperger's.

Karahalios' team has prepared for a year and will run the study this summer at the College Park, Maryland, campus.