Paralinguistic cues are the non-phonemic aspects of human speech that convey information about the affective state of the speaker. In children’s speech, these events are also important markers for the detection of early developmental disorders. Detecting these events in hours of audio data would be beneficial for clinicians to analyze the social behaviors of children. The chapter focuses on the...

The aim of this paper is twofold: 1) to examine the nature, scope and function o f the paralinguistic features on the basis o f a survey of the previous studies, and 2) to make an attempt to search and exempli fy paralinguistic features operating at vari ous linguistic and non-linguistic units in s everal languages. A special emphasis will be placed on the paralinguistic functions o f phonetic ...

This study focuses on feature selection in paralinguistic analysis and presents recently developed supervised and unsupervised methods for feature subset selection and feature ranking. Using the standard k-nearest-neighbors (kNN) rule as the classification algorithm, the feature selection methods are evaluated individually and in different combinations in seven paralinguistic speaker trait clas...

If speech analysis is to detect a speaker’s emotional state, it needs to derive information from both linguistic information, i.e., the qualitative targets that the speaker has attained (or approximated), conforming to the rules of language; and paralinguistic information, i.e., allowed variations in the way that qualitative linguistic targets are realised. It also needs an appropriate represen...

Paralinguistic analysis is increasingly turning into a mainstream topic in speech and language processing. This article aims to provide a broad overview of the constantly growing field by defining the field, introducing typical applications, presenting exemplary resources, and sharing a unified view of the chain of processing. It then presents the first broader Paralinguistic Challenge organise...

Paralinguistic speech processing is important in addressing many issues, such as sentiment and neurocognitive disorder analyses. Recently, Transformer has achieved remarkable success the natural language field demonstrated its adaptation to speech. However, previous works on have not incorporated properties of speech, leaving full potential unexplored. In this paper, we consider characteristics...

Expressive interjection (EI) is defined as non-lexical speech sound which indicates the speaker’s cognitive/affective state changes. It is a type of vocal affect burst, i.e., brief and sudden nonverbal expressions that are produced spontaneously and unconsciously. Although EI as a social signal is assumed to play an important part in speech communication, very little is known about its linguist...

The following is concerned with the linguistic components of expressive speech synthesis. It tries to fulfil the role that Huckvale (2002) assigns to the linguist in speech science for speech synthesis. Linguists find models and parameters for the description of language. The semiotic foundations for the study of expressive herein have to be modelled upon a concept that every sign has got a con...