This paper discusses rhythmic characteristics of Standard Chinese. The study is based on relevant acoustic-phonetic investigations, including some paralinguistic analyses. The preliminary result leads to the considerations that (1) there is no evidence to regard Chinese as a syllable-timed language; (2) speech rhythm may be more related to regular occurrence and variation of certain prosodic ph...

Voice quality conveys both linguistic and paralinguistic information, and can be distinguished by acoustic source characteristics. We label objective voice quality categories based on the harmonic structure (H1-H2) and the mean autocorrelation ratio of each phone. Results from a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification experiment show that these features are predictive of Perceptual Linear P...

Speech synchronized facial animation that controls only the movement of the mouth is typically perceived as wooden and unnatural. We propose a method to generate additional facial expressions such as movement of the head, the eyes, and the eyebrows fully automatically from the input speech signal. This is achieved by extracting prosodic parameters such as pitch flow and power spectrum from the ...

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...