Laughing, Breathing, Clicking - The Prosody of Nonverbal Vocalisations

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.