The spontaneous speech of negative-syndrome schizophrenia patients is underproductive and contains many hesitations and pauses. Acoustic analysis of the patient's speech during interview reveals that the duration of pauses, independent of other linguistic or paralinguistic measures, correlates strongly with the clinician's impressions of the patient's flat affect and alogia. Pausing is less rel...

Laughter is an important para-linguistic cue that can be useful in gauging the affective state of the speaker. In this paper, we present an approach to detecting laughter in children’s speech using acoustic features in the spectral and prosodic domains. Feature selection was performed using the information gain-based technique and a speaker-independent validation using a support vector machine ...

Objective: The aim of the work is to compare results research on oral language people with neurodegenerative diseases. On basis literature, and available information, methodologies in subject test are presented. Speech variables that have been considered studies were presented, including linguistic, phonetic phonological features, prosodic, acoustic, lexical, semantic, syntactic morpho-syntacti...

Rhythm patterns play an important role in the perception of second-language (L2) speech. This paper presents a novel approach to evaluating L2 speech rhythm using low-frequency spectral features inspired by the rhythmogram auditory model. In this paper we investigate several new feature sets for use in training rhythm-centric acoustic models. By capturing information over suprasegmental linguis...

In this study we will give an overview of the experimental work on the neuroanatomical correlates of language and speech production that we have done in recent years. First we will introduce the methodology of event-related functional magnetic neuro-imaging and the experimental paradigm that we employed. Then we will present and discuss the results of our experiments on (1) speech motor control...

The prosodic focus conveys the information of the yes/no deixis function on a given linguistic domain, generally the word, quite in all languages, and presumably in an universal morphology. Our proposal is that the prosody of focus conveys together some complementary information: the domain of the deixis (phone, syllable, word, larger) and a gradient functional value of insistance which could b...

As features unique to spoken language, speech prosody plays an important role in human communication. Although the acoustic features of speech are viewed most frequently in a frame-byframe manner, this is not always appropriate for prosodic features, since they are tightly related to higher level linguistic information, such as syntactic and discourse structures, and spread to wide time spans, ...

Stimuli from two previously presented comprehension tasks of affective and linguistic prosody (Pell & Baum, 1997) were analyzed acoustically and subjected to several discriminant function analyses, following Van Lancker and Sidtis (1992). An analysis of the errors made on these tasks by left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) and right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) subjects examined whether each clinical grou...

Background: The effect of subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) on the voice features in Parkinson’s disease (PD) is controversial. No study has evaluated the voice features of PD underwent STN-DBS by the acoustic, perceptual, and patient-based assessments comprehensively. Furthermore, there is no study to investigate prosodic features before and after DBS in PD. The curren...

With the aim of automatically generating head motions from speech, analyses are conducted for verifying the relations between head motions and linguistic and paralinguistic information carried by speech. Analyses are conducted on motion captured data during natural dialogue. Analysis results showed that nods frequently occur during speech utterances, not only for expressing dialog acts such as ...