A smile may convey different communicative intentions depending on subtle characteristics of the facial expression. Moreover, during an interaction, the expression of smile impacts on the observer’s perception of both the social stance of the speaker and of the content of the talk. In this paper, we describe a perceptual study where we explore the effects of virtual characters displaying differ...

When addressing their young infants, parents systematically modify their speech. Such infant-directed speech (IDS) contains exaggerated vowel formants, which have been proposed to foster language development via articulation of more distinct speech sounds. Here, this assumption is rigorously tested using both acoustic and, for the first time, fine-grained articulatory measures. Mothers were rec...