Laughter Meaning Construction and Use in Development: Children and Spoken Dialogue Systems

Abstract

In the current work a brief overview of some studies conducted on laughter taking a multidisciplinary perspective will be presented. The integration of analyses of corpus data, theoretical and formal insights, behavioural experiments, machine learning methods, and developmental data, turned out to be fruitful to gain insight into laughter behaviour and on how its production contributes to our conversations. A crucial claim emerging from the studies presented is that laughter conveys propositional meaning interacting with other modalities, in a manner akin to other content bearing words. The implications that such results have for the implementations of more competent, from a semantic and pragmatic perspective, spoken dialogue systems will be outlined. Especially the qualitative and quantitative analysis of developmental data will offer the basis for the proposal of some specific applications.