Non-verbal information in spontaneous speech -- towards a new framework of analysis

Non-verbal signals in speech are encoded by prosody and carry information that ranges from conversation action to attitude and emotion. Despite its importance, the principles that govern prosodic structure are not yet adequately understood. This paper offers an analytical schema and a technological proof-of-concept for the categorization of prosodic signals and their association with meaning. The schema interprets surface-representations of multi-layered prosodic events. As a first step towards implementation, we present a classification process that disentangles prosodic phenomena of three orders. It relies on fine-tuning a pre-trained speech recognition model, enabling the simultaneous multi-class/multi-label detection. It generalizes over a large variety of spontaneous data, performing on a par with, or superior to, human annotation. In addition to a standardized formalization of prosody, disentangling prosodic patterns can direct a theory of communication and speech organization. A welcome by-product is an interpretation of prosody that will enhance speech- and language-related technologies

Phonetic duration of nouns depends on de-lexicalized syntactic distributions:Evidence from naturally occurring conversation

We explore whether de-lexicalized syntactic information impactsthe phonetic duration of nouns. The motivating expectation is thatnouns that carry more syntactic information will be more difficultto produce in situ, leading to longer durations. We approach thisquestion from two perspectives: pure diversity of a noun'sdistribution across its available syntactic relations, and distance ofthis distribution from the average distribution of nouns in thelanguage at large. The former measure is designed to capture theinterconnectivity between the lexical and syntactic tiers oflinguistic representation. The latter measure targets how well anindividual noun fits the behavior expected for the noun class. Wefind that durations are sensitive to both measures incomplementary fashion: nouns with more diverse syntacticdistributions are produced with longer durations, and nouns thathave distinctive (non-prototypical) distributions have shorterdurations