Rhythmic Patterns in Native and Non-Native Mandarin Speech

Abstract

When analysing human spoken communication the focus on the linguistic side lies on speech with its verbal message, whereas the focus on the non-linguistic side usually is on the visually transported information such as gestures and facial expression. However, speech, especially in talk-in-interaction, also features numerous nonverbal vocalisations including various forms of laughter and inhalation noises as their most frequent forms. Although nonverbal vocalisations are usually short in duration they may provide rich information on linguistic, paralinguistic and extralinguistic levels including prosodic phrasing, cognitive load, affective state or speaker identity. The paper provides an overview of the phonetic and prosodic structure and the timing of laughter and audible breathing. Special attention is given on conversational speech, where we can frequently find situations in which interlocutors overlap temporally and on apical click sounds that often occur with inhalation before upcoming articulation but also during word-finding difficulties.

Breath and non-breath pauses in fluent and disfluent phases of German and French L1 and L2 read speech

“…Pauses filled with breath noise were longer than those without, as expected, and the analysis also revealed that in fluent phases the vast majority of pauses contains audible inhalation -which requires a reinterpretation of the terms "unfilled" and "silent" pauses that are often mentioned in the literature [2,3,4,5]. Future studies have to show further details of the acoustic content of "silent" pauses, particularly the production of tongue clicks [14].…”

“…In step 2, all pauses were annotated for whether they contained one or more of the following categories: silence, audible inhalation, clearly identified audible exhalation, and clicks, which occur rather frequently (cf. [14]) but were not considered for further analysis here. In addition there was the category of unclear cases.…”

Superior Communication of Positive Emotions Through Nonverbal Vocalisations Compared to Speech Prosody

“…Nonverbal vocalizations, on the other hand, are largely unconstrained by linguistic structure (e.g., Pell et al, 2015;Scott, Sauter, & McGettigan, 2010). They are produced at the glottal/subglottal level with reduced volitional control of the vocal tract configurations (Trouvain, 2014). A lack of volitional control and linguistic constraints on nonverbal vocalizations leads to greater acoustic variability in nonverbal expression of emotions compared to prosodic expressions of emotions (e.g., Jessen & Kotz, 2011;Lima et al, 2013).…”

Prosodia emocional y conversación espontánea: bases para el establecimiento de un protocolo de identificación perceptiva

“…Definimos las expresiones fónicas no verbales o vocalizaciones no verbales ('nonverbal vocalisations') como aquellos elementos no verbales con correlato fónico (Sauter et al 2010;Trouvain, 2014;Meneses y Igarashi, 2006;Kohler, 2008) que contribuyen a la identificación perceptiva de una determinada emoción.…”