Narrative length and speech rate of traumatic recollections have been previously associated with different emotions and adjustment trajectories after trauma. However, the evidence is limited and the results are mixed. The present study aimed to evaluate length (i.e., word count) and speech rate (i.e., words per minute) in narratives of events with different valence (i.e., neutral, positive, and...

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder, often referred as being characterized by dissociation between verbal and non-verbal abilities, although the number of studies disputing this proposal is emerging. Indeed, although they have been traditionally reported as displaying increased speech fluency, this topic has not been fully addressed in research. In previous studies c...

The assumption about the formal and semantic link between language and genre is the starting point of this study. The absurd in speech is analyzed in texts written by N. Gogol and D. Kharms, while absurd genres are tackled on the basis of the narratives of Dostoevsky, Camus and Sabato. The reality of modern times and all aspects of its artistic representations have altered the form and ideology...

Speech produced by subjects during neuropsychological exams can provide markers other than test performance, via spoken language characteristics that discriminate between subject groups. We present preliminary results on the utility of such markers, automatically derived from spoken responses to narrative recall tests, in discriminating between healthy elderly and subjects with Mild Cognitive I...

Cross-linguistically, vowel length contrasts may involve changes in vowel quality. In a different but more gradient way, speech style influences vowel articulation. While both alter vowel acoustics, it remains unclear whether both are byproducts of general processes of vowel undershoot or reflect a modification of articulatory gestures independent of durational constraints. This study investiga...

Language impairment (LI) in children is pervasive in all walks of life. Automatic prediction of LI is useful as a first pass for speech language pathologists in identifying prospective children with LI. Previous work in the automatic prediction of LI has explored various features, mostly shallow and surface level features. In this paper, we evaluate deeper Natural Language Processing (NLP) feat...

This paper argues for a robust notion of collective identity which is not reduced to a psychological conception of identity. In a first part the debate on the concept of identity raised by several authors is taken up critically with the intention to defend a strong sociological conception of identity which by definition is a collective identity. The basic assumption is that collective identitie...