Prosody fulfills a variety of functions in dialogues. Our study examines the relationship between different levels of perceived prominence of syllables and the linguistic and paralinguistic categories accent and emphasis which are conveyed prosodically. It is still unclear, how a notational system might look like that is able to capture the fine–grained differences between both. The notion of p...

This paper deals with the role of paralinguistic expression in articulatory speech synthesis. We describe two experiments which investigate the perception of certain vs. uncertain utterances produced by articulatory speech synthesis, using the system developed in [1]. Experiment 1 tests to what extent subjects are able to identify certainty and uncertainty as intended paralinguistic expressions...

The present study examines the coordination of lexical and paralinguistic F0 in second language (henceforth L2) production. We tested how L2 learners manage to handle F0 when F0 in their first language (henceforth L1) carries a paralinguistic function, but a lexical one in their L2 and vice versa. Participants (fifteen L1 Japanese speakers and fifteen L1 German speakers, proficient also in thei...

Humans perceive emotion from each other using a holistic perspective, accounting for diverse personal, non-emotional variables, such as age and personality, that shape expression. In contrast, today’s algorithms are mainly designed to recognize in isolation, usually demonstrated only within one relatively narrow database. this article, we propose multi-task learning approach jointly learn the r...

A framework of speech communication is presented in which natural spontaneous data and speech modelling are interrelated in a cyclic progession towards the goal of elucidating linguistic behaviour. Paralinguistic phenomena are treated as an integral part of a theory of speech communication. Data acquisition design has to adapt to the naturalness requirement.

Creaky voice carries important linguistic and paralinguistic information. Parameters based on autocorrelation of the glottal excitation waveform are proposed for automatic detection of creaky voice in spontaneous speech. Analysis results show the ratio of the first two peaks of the autocorrelation function as a primary parameter to detect creaky voice.

The Utsunomiya University (UU) Spoken Dialogue Database for Paralinguistic Information Studies is introduced. The UU Database is especially intended for use in understanding the usage, structure and effect of paralinguistic information in expressive Japanese conversational speech. Paralinguistic information refers to meaningful information, such as emotion or attitude, delivered along with ling...