In the present paper we address the old question of respiratory planning in speech production. We recast the problem in terms of speakers' communicative goals and propose that speakers try to minimize respiratory effort in line with the H&H theory. We analyze respiratory cycles coinciding with no speech (i.e., silence), short verbal feedback expressions (SFE's) as well as longer vocalizations in terms of parameters of the respiratory cycle and find little evidence for respiratory planning in feedback production. We also investigate timing of speech and SFEs in the exhalation and contrast it with nods. We find that while speech is strongly tied to the exhalation onset, SFEs are distributed much more uniformly throughout the exhalation and are often produced on residual air. Given that nods, which do not have any respiratory constraints, tend to be more frequent toward the end of an exhalation, we propose a mechanism whereby respiratory patterns are determined by the trade-off between speakers' communicative goals and respiratory constraints.
The ALICO corpus: analysing the active listener. Abstract The Active Listening Corpus (ALICO) is a multimodal data set of spontaneous dyadic conversations in German with diverse speech and gestural annotations of both dialogue partners. The annotations consist of short feedback expression transcriptions with corresponding communicative function interpretations as well as segmentations of interpausal units, words, rhythmic prominence intervals and vowel-to-vowel intervals. Additionally, ALICO contains head gesture annotations of both interlocutors. The corpus contributes to research on spontaneous human-human interaction, on functional relations between modalities, and timing variability in dialogue. It also provides data that differentiates between distracted and attentive listeners. We describe the main characteristics of the corpus and briefly present the most important results obtained from analyses in recent years.
This paper investigates to what extent breathing can be used as a cue to turn-taking behaviour. The paper improves on existing accounts by considering all possible transitions between speaker states (silent, speaking, backchanneling) and by not relying on global speaker models. Instead, all features (including breathing range and resting expiratory level) are estimated in an incremental fashion using the left-hand context. We identify several inhalatory features relevant to turn-management, and assess the fit of models with these features as predictors of turntaking behaviour.
This paper presents first results on using acoustic intensity of inhalations as a cue to speech initiation in spontaneous multiparty conversations. We demonstrate that inhalation intensity significantly differentiates between cycles coinciding with no speech activity, shorter (< 1 s) and longer stretches of speech. While the model fit is relatively weak, it is comparable to the fit of a model using kinematic features collected with Respiratory Inductance Plethysmography. We also show that incorporating both kinematic and acoustic features further improves the model. Given the ease of capturing breath acoustics, we consider the results to be a promising first step towards studying communicative functions of respiratory sounds. We discuss possible extensions to the data collection procedure with a view to improving predictive power of the model.
In the present study, we investigate pupil dilation as a measure of lexical retrieval. We captured pupil size changes in reaction to a match or a mismatch between a picture and an auditorily presented word in 120 trials presented to ten native speakers of Swedish. In each trial a picture was displayed for six seconds, and 2.5 seconds into the trial the word was played through loudspeakers. The picture and the word were matching in half of the trials, and all stimuli were common high-frequency monosyllabic Swedish words. The difference in pupil diameter trajectories across the two conditions was analyzed with Functional Data Analysis. In line with the expectations, the results indicate greater dilation in the mismatch condition starting from around 800 ms after the stimulus onset. Given that similar processes were observed in brain imaging studies, pupil dilation measurements seem to provide an appropriate tool to reveal lexical retrieval. The results suggest that pupillometry could be a viable alternative to existing methods in the field of speech and language processing, especially in studies involving infants, clinical groups or field recordings
Voice quality is an important dimension in human communication, used to mark a variety of phenomena in speech, including prosodic prominence. Even though numerous studies have shown that speakers modify their voice quality parameters for marking prosodic prominence, the impact of these modifications on perceived prominence is less studied. Our investigation looks at the effect of a well-known measure of voice quality, cepstral peak prominence (CPP), on syllabic prominence ratings given by both naive and expert listeners. Employing read speech materials in German, we quantify the role of CPP alone and in combination with other acoustic cues marking prominence, namely intensity, duration and fundamental frequency. While CPP, by itself, had a significant effect on the perceived prominence for most of the listeners, when used in conjunction with the other cues, its impact was reduced. Moreover, when assessing the importance of each of these four cues for determining the perceived prominence score we found important individual variation, as well as differences between naive and expert listeners.
We present a methodology for assessing similarities and differences between language varieties and dialects in terms of prosodic characteristics. A multi-speaker, multi-dialect WaveNet network is trained on low sample-rate signal retaining only prosodic characteristics of the original speech. The network is conditioned on labels related to speakers' region or dialect. The resulting conditioning embeddings are subsequently used as a multi-dimensional characteristics of different language varieties, with results consistent with dialectological studies. The method and results are illustrated on a Swedia 2000 corpus of Swedish dialectal variation.
This work revisits the idea that voice quality dynamics (VQ) contributes to conveying pragmatic distinctions, with two case studies to further test this idea. First, we explore VQ as a turntaking cue, and then as a cue for distinguishing between different functions of affirmative cue words. We employ acoustic VQ measures claimed to be better suited for continuous speech than those in own previous work. Both cases indicate that the degree of periodicity (as measured by CPPS) is indeed relevant in the production of the different pragmatic functions. In particular, turn-yielding is characterized by lower periodicity, sometimes accompanied by presence of creaky voice. Periodicity also distinguishes between backchannels, agreements and acknowledgements.
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