language users benefit from special phonetic tools in order to communicate linguistic information as well as different emotional aspects and paralinguistic information through daily conversation. having functions in conveying semantic information to listeners, prosodic features form the essential part of linguistic behavour, manipulating  them potentially can play an important role in transmitt...

Speaker and paralinguistic properties of dialogue speech that affect the timing at turn changes are investigated by analyzing the UU Database for Paralinguistic Information Studies. The results showed a large variation among speakers and a strong interaction with partner in pause/overlap duration. In addition, perceived emotional states of utterances had significant effects on the pause/overlap...

Interjections are often used in dialogue communication for expressing a reaction (such as agreement, surprise and disgust) to the interlocutor. Thus, a correct interpretation of the paralinguistic information (intention, attitude or emotion) carried by interjections is important for achieving a smooth dialogue interaction between humans and robots. In the present work, analyses are conducted on...

Corpus based text-to-speech systems currently produce very natural synthetic sentences, though limited to a neutral inexpressive speaking style. Paralinguistic elements are some of the expressive features one would most like to introduce. In this paper, we describe a new method for introducing laughter and hesitation in synthetic speech. Thanks to a small dedicated acoustic database, this metho...

Many paralinguistic tasks are closely related and thus representations learned in one domain can be leveraged for another. In this paper, we investigate how knowledge can be transferred between three paralinguistic tasks: speaker, emotion, and gender recognition. Further, we extend this problem to cross-dataset tasks, asking how knowledge captured in one emotion dataset can be transferred to an...

The local speech rate is one of the important prosodic parameters for representing both linguistic and paralinguistic information. The present paper presents a command-response model for the process of speech rate control, and applies it to the analysis of the effects of emphasis on the local speech rate in English utterances. It shows that the local speech rate as a function of time can be app...

“Rikimi” is a “pressed-type” voice quality that appears in Japanese conversational speech for expressing paralinguistic information related to emotional or attitudinal behaviors of the speaker. We conducted acoustic, electroglottographic (EGG) and paralinguistic analyses on speech segments including “rikimi”, extracted from spontaneous dialogue speech data. “Rikimi” may be accompanied by severa...

Voice user interfaces and digital assistants are rapidly entering our lives becoming singular touch points spanning devices. These always-on services capture transmit audio data to powerful cloud for further processing subsequent actions. Our voices raw signals collected through these devices contain a host of sensitive paralinguistic information that is transmitted service providers regardless...

The present study investigated the effect of fear on paralinguistic aspects of speech in patients suffering from panic disorder with agoraphobia (N = 25). An experiment was conducted that comprised two modules: Autobiographical Talking and Script Talking. Each module consisted of two emotional conditions: Fearful and Happy. Speech was recorded digitally and analyzed using PRAAT, a computer prog...

This study is part of a longer-term project to provide embodied conversational agents (ECAs) with behaviors that enable them to build and maintain rapport with their human partners. We focus on paralinguistic behaviors, and especially nonverbal behaviors, and their role in communicating rapport. Using an ECA that guides its players through a speech-controlled game, we attempt to measure the fam...