BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVE Osteoarthritis (OA) is a highly prevalent condition worldwide. Yoga is potentially a safe and feasible option for managing OA; however, the extent of long-term yoga adherence is unknown. The purpose of this study was to examine yoga adherence 6 months after participants completed an OA intervention program. METHODS This follow-up study employed a cross-sectional descripti...

This paper aims at studying the acoustic development of child’s laughter and its relation to language acquisition. To our knowledge, the first study dealing with the acoustic proprieties of laughter is due to Habermann (1955). In this work, the author provided anemographic data and defines laughter as a reflexphenomenon with expiratory movements stopped by aspiratory pulses. Luchsinger and Arno...

Group membership is important for how we perceive others, but although perceivers can accurately infer group membership from facial expressions and spoken language, it is not clear whether listeners can identify in- and out-group members from non-verbal vocalizations. In the current study, we examined perceivers' ability to identify group membership from non-verbal vocalizations of laughter, te...

Spontaneous human speech contains a lot of sounds that are not proper speech, yet carry meaning, laughter being a good example. Recognizing such sounds from speech-sounds could improve speech recognition systems as well as widen the communicative range of automatic dialogue systems. Our goal is to develop methods for automatic classification non-speech vocal sounds. As laughter varies widely be...

The placement of laughter in the speech of hearing individuals is not random but "punctuates" speech, occurring during pauses and at phrase boundaries where punctuation would be placed in a transcript of a conversation. For speakers, language is dominant in the competition for the vocal tract since laughter seldom interrupts spoken phrases. For users of American Sign Language, however, laughter...

Laughter is an important social signal in human communication. This paper proposes a statistical framework for generating laughter upper body animations. These animations are driven by two types of input signals, namely the acoustic segmentation of laughter as pseudophoneme sequence and acoustic features. During the training step, our statistical framework learns the relationship between the la...

Laughter is a strong social signal in human-human and human-machine communication. However, very few attempts to model it exist. In this paper we discuss several challenges regarding the generation of laughs. We focus, more particularly, on two aspects a) modeling laughter with different intensities and b) modeling respiration behavior during laughter. Both of these models combine a data-driven...

Laughter recognition is an underexplored area of research. My goal for this project was to improve upon my previous work to automatically detect laughter on a frame-byframe basis. My previous system (baseline system) detected laughter based on shortterm features including MFCCs, pitch, and energy. In this project, I have explored the utility of additional features (phone and prosodic) both by t...

This paper compares the acoustic differences in spontaneous recordings of child and adult laughter. Results indicate that, mean pitch and intensity of laughter are significantly different in adults and children but they follow expected speech patterns. Children also have higher vocal tract resonant frequencies when compared to adults. However, both groups were similar in differentiating the non...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the association of laughter with subjective health independent of socioeconomic status and social participation among older people in Japan. We used the data of 26,368 individuals (men, 12,174; women, 14,194) 65 years or older who participated in the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study (JAGES) in 2013. Participants provided information on laughter and sel...