background: pragmatics is appropriate use of language across a variety of social contexts  that  provides accurate interpretation   of   intentions.   the   occurrence    of   the right hemisphere lesions can interfere with pragmatic abilities, and particularly with the processing of nonliteral speech acts. methods: since the objective of this study was to assess different  aspects of pragmatic...

How does language knowledge affect processing of paralinguistic information—vocal properties that are not directly related to understanding words? This study investigates links between a listener’s native language, any other languages they may have experience in, and the ability to identify vocal emotional information in those languages. The study focuses on two particular classes of languages:...

UNLABELLED The aim of the present study was to evaluate the pragmatic abilities of patients with schizophrenia in a variety of pragmatic phenomena expressed through different communicative means (language, gestures, and paralinguistic modality). For this purpose we used the Assessment Battery of Communication (ABaCo; Sacco et al., 2008). The ABaCo is a validated clinical tool for assessing prag...

There has been a lot of prior work on representation learning for speech recognition applications, but not much emphasis has been given to an investigation of effective representations of affect from speech, where the paralinguistic elements of speech are separated out from the verbal content. In this paper, we explore denoising autoencoders for learning paralinguistic attributes, i.e. categori...

One of the perceived drawbacks of e-learning is the absence of non-verbal communication. This leads one to conclude that e-learning in general, and fully online education in particular, is inferior to its on-campus counterpart in terms of its communicative capability. This paper challenges this viewpoint, arguing that not only is non-verbal communication ‘alive and well’ in an online educationa...

In conventional paralinguistic classification approaches, information gained by low level features is described over broad segments (like whole turns) via statistical functionals. This procedure presumes meaningful information to be embodied within the whole segment. This assumption may be misleading if distinctive cues within a sample are surrounded by non-meaningful information or noise. In t...