According to many psychological and social studies, vocal messages contain two distinct channels—an explicit, linguistic channel, and an implicit, paralinguistic channel. In particular, the latter contains information about the emotional state of the speaker, providing clues about the implicit meaning of the message. Such information can improve applications requiring human-machine interactions...

Prosody is known to play an important role in human speech perception process. Therefore, there is an increasing need to use prosodic features for the advancement of speech recognition technology. However, prosody is related to various levels of information, from linguistic, para-linguistic, to non-linguistic, and, therefore, its acoustic manifestation is rather complicated with large variation...

Skilled clinicians are able to integrate linguistic, paralinguistic, and non-linguistic cues in the assessment of mood disorders. This project identified durationand amplitude-based aspects of the speech signal that can be measured automatically by computer and which provide paralinguistic information about the apparent affect of a speech sample. A group of 40 experimental subjects produced 158...

We examine the utility of multiple types of turn-level and contextual linguistic features for automatically predicting student emotions in human-human spoken tutoring dialogues. We first annotate student turns in our corpus for negative, neutral and positive emotions. We then automatically extract features representing acoustic-prosodic and other linguistic information from the speech signal an...

This paper investigates the use of heterogeneous speech corpora for automatic assessment of personality traits in terms of the BigFive OCEAN dimensions. The motivation for this work is twofold: the need to develop methods to overcome the lack of children’s speech corpora, particularly severe when targeting personality traits, and the interest on cross-age comparisons of acoustic-prosodic featur...

The paper studies the prosodic development of 9 Mandarin infants (5 males and 4 females) in Changsha through the acoustic and statistic analysis of the infants’ data from their pre-linguistic and early speech stages. After the analysis, following results have been obtained: 1) the level and simple prosodic patterns are highly frequent in the infants’ prosodic production for the two stages. Furt...

The paper analyzes both acoustic and linguistic features with different Chinese prosodic boundaries. Then a rule-learning approach was used to do the prosodic boundary labelling. In the paper the prosodic boundaries are classified into four levels, full intonational boundary with strong intonational marking with/without lengthening or change in speech tempo, prosodic phrase boundary with rather...

This paper presents a discussion of the role of voice quality in prosody. Illustrations from past production and perception data by the authors indicate that source parameters other than f0 are an inherent part of prosody, implicated in both its linguistic and paralinguistic functions. While prosodic (intonational) analyses of a language tend to be largely presented in terms of f0 dynamics, the...

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 study explored the perception and acoustic features of prosodic hierarchy boundaries in Uygur and Mandarin Chinese. The results of the perception study showed that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were more sensitive to prosodic hierarchy boundaries than native speakers of Uygur. The results of a detailed acoustic analysis indicated that the acoustic features of Uygur prosodic hierarchy ...