We investigate whether automatic accent identification is more effective for English utterances embedded in a different language as part of a mixed code than for English utterances that are part of a monolingual dialogue. Our focus is on Xhosa and Zulu, two South African languages for which code mixing with English is very common. In order to carry out our investigation, we extract English utte...

Fifty-one children with language delays, and their mothers, were studied to identify characteristics of the children’s utterances that potentially influence an aspect of maternal linguistic input: expansions. A subset of 33 of these dyads was studied and submitted to sequential analysis to identify the types of child utterances mothers were most likely to expand. Twenty-minute mother-child free...

Research on human-agent interaction has focused mainly on domains which are conversational in nature, but little work has been done on examining the behavior of interactive agents in domains such as team sports. This paper analyzes utterance behavior in this domain, specifically a virtual basketball game with an agent teammate. The main motivation is to assess the nature of utterances during th...

Entrainment, a physical phenomenon in which one individual’s expressed information synchronizes with another’s and vice versa, can be observed between two communicators who are in smooth interaction. In this study, we focused on the “rate of utterances” as communicators’ expressed information, and then conducted an experiment to observe whether entrainments exist in the rate of utterances in sp...

Evaluation of syllable stress in speech utterances is an important and challenging task in the area of speaker evaluation. In this paper, we propose a method to classify correct utterances of English words based on the evaluation of the lexical syllable stress pattern. Here we use only correctly stressed utterances of the words as training samples since a statistically significant pool of incor...