THE RADIO-DRAMA AS ARTISTIC MODALITY TO IMPROVE THE EXPRESSIVENESS SKILLS IN INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY AND AUTISM: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

The paper presents an artistic experience aimed at developing the vocal and emotional expressiveness of young people with intellectual, relational and physical disabilities. It follows the Esagramma® methodology, called Affective Vocal Education (EVA), and focuses on the production of a radio-drama based on the Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. It was realized by an actor and a sound engineer together with 5 girls and 1 boy with various diagnoses affecting their verbal and relational skills. A specific methodology allowed us to quantify macroscopic dialogic and prosodic variations before and after the artistic experience, by extracting a set of suprasegmental features thanks to a pre- and a post-test recording of spontaneous and elicited speech. Moreover, the paper describes the development of the theatrical script, the operational and artistic choices as well as the analysis of the complexity of the radio-drama from a linguistic point of view.   Il radiodramma come modalità artistica per migliorare le capacità espressive nella disabilità intellettive e nell’autismo: uno studio sperimentale L’articolo presenta un percorso artistico volto a sviluppare l’espressività vocale ed emotiva di giovani con disabilità intellettive, relazionali e fisiche. L’attività svolta segue la metodologia Esagramma®, denominata Affective Vocal Education (EVA) e si concentra sulla produzione di un dramma radiofonico basato sul Roman de la Rose di Guillaume de Lorris e Jean de Meun. Il prodotto audio è stato realizzato da un attore e un ingegnere del suono insieme a 5 ragazze e 1 ragazzo con varie disabilità che ne influenzano le capacità verbali e relazionali. Una specifica metodologia permette di quantificare le variazioni macroscopiche dialogiche e prosodiche prima e dopo il percorso artistico, tramite l’estrazione di un insieme di caratteristiche soprasegmentali da registrazioni raccolte sia prima che dopo il percorso. L’articolo descrive inoltre lo sviluppo della sceneggiatura teatrale, le scelte esecutive ed artistiche e l’analisi della complessità del radiodramma dal punto di vista linguistico

Corrective Focus Detection in Italian Speech Using Neural Networks

The corrective focus is a particular kind of prosodic prominence where the speaker is intended to correct or to emphasize a concept. This work develops an Artificial Cognitive System (ACS) based on Recurrent Neural Networks that analyzes suitablefeatures of the audio channel in order to automatically identify the Corrective Focus on speech signals. Two different approaches to build the ACS have been developed. The first one addresses the detection of focused syllables within a given Intonational Unit whereas the second one identifies a whole IU as focused or not. The experimental evaluation over an Italian Corpus has shown the ability of the Artificial Cognitive System to identify the focus in the speaker IUs. This ability can lead to further important improvements in human-machine communication. The addressed problem is a good example of synergies between Humans and Artificial Cognitive Systems.The research leading to the results in this paper has been conducted in the project EMPATHIC (Grant N: 769872) that received funding from the European Union’s Horizon2020 research and innovation programme.Additionally, this work has been partially funded by the Spanish Minister of Science under grants TIN2014-54288-C4-4-R and TIN2017-85854-C4-3-R, by the Basque Government under grant PRE_2017_1_0357,andby the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU under grantPIF17/310

CALLIOPE: A multi-dimensional model for the prosodic characterization of Information Units

CALLIOPE is a conceptual multi-dimensional model that aims at approximating and categorizing the prosodic phenomena taking into account of all possible independent factors affecting the sound of so-called Information Units (IUs). In CALLIOPE, each IU is associated with a tuple composed of 12 labels, each belonging to a different dimension representing a characteristic influencing the prosodic behaviour. Its ultimate aim is creating well-defined corpora suitable for linguistic and engineering research

The definition of a descriptive space of Italian prosodic forms: The CALLIOPE model

CALLIOPE (Combined and Assessed List of Latent Influences On Prosodic Expressivity) is a model that aims at categorizing all prosodic forms. Following Cresti (2000), we will call sentences as Information Units (UI). Each UI has a surjective correspondence with a specific prosodic unit, and conveys a specific informative intention. With our model, we aim at providing a list of all possible factors that affect the prosody, and consequently the interpretation, of every UI. The CALLIOPE model defines a multidimensional “space”, where each “dimension” represents a characteristic influencing the vocal paralinguistic components of UIs. Each characteristic is actually a categorical variable, assuming values in a set of labels; for example, the dimension Emotion contains the labels sadness, joy, fear, etc

CALLIOPE: A multi-dimensional model for the prosodic characterisation of Information Units

CALLIOPE is a conceptual multi-dimensional model that aims at approximating and categorising the prosodic phenomena. Its goal is to provide a method suitable for the analysis of dialogue and dialogic interaction, and the design of vocal corpora usable in the development of deep learning algorithms, merging theories belonging to different research fields on human language. CALLIOPE contains all possible independent factors affecting the sound of so-called Information Units (IUs). In CALLIOPE, each IU is associated with a tuple composed of 12 labels, where each of them belongs to a different dimension representing a characteristic influencing the prosodic behaviour. These dimensions are divided into two groups: the first one containing fully defined characteristics directly related to the dialogic dimension (e.g. Motivational state, Rhetorical form, etc.), while the second one takes into account dimensions that exist regardless of the presence of interaction (e.g. Language or dialect, social context, etc.)

Influence of semantics on the perception of Corrective Focus in spoken Italian language

This study is a web-based, psychoacoustic test for adult, Italian native-speakers, investigating detection of different prosodic phenomena in Standard Italian utterances. The purpose was to investigate the influence of semantics on human ability to recognise different prosodic aspects, in order to understand the basic pieces of information involved into the psychoacoustic process of verbal comprehension. In particular, one section of the test regarded the ability to recognize the presence of a Corrective Focus, which is a spoken constituent that is a direct rejection of an alternative. Results show Corrective Focus seems difficult to detect into isolated audio utterances. Semantics seems to improve detection accuracy; phonotactics, instead, seems not to add useful information; finally, our test confirms correlation with prominent syllables

Verso il riconoscimento automatico della prosodia

This paper presents our approach to automatic recognition of prosodic forms. In particular, we present: CALLIOPE, a multi-dimensional model aiming at categorizing all prosodic forms; SI-CALLIOPE, a sub-space for which we defined a corpus of recorder prosodic forms; and the psychoacoustic experiment we are currently planning for investigating main acoustic behaviours and features involved into the discrimination of prosodic forms. The results of the experiment will be useful for defining the acoustic/textual features to rely on for automatic recognition of prosodic forms. For that reason, we are also defining a classifier, based on Neural Nets. This study is part of the LYV project, which focuses on improving prosodic expressiveness skills of Italian speakers with autism and other cognitive disabilities

A phonetic comparison of two Irish English varieties

This research offers a preliminary survey on vowels and diphthong variation between two Irish English varieties: Galway (GW) and Letterkenny (LK). The results showed only a smaller difference between GW and LK with respect to the monophthongs, whereas a larger difference was found for the MOUTH diphthong. Despite the great amount of literature on English dialects, a phonetic investigation of these specific varieties is still lacking. This study may open the path to further investigations of sociophonetic values and the stereotypes associated with different varieties, in particular those of the northern regions

Acoustic and grammatical characterization of crisis-related babblings in Italian persons undergoing Courts-of-Law examinations

This work investigates babblings during crises in Italian persons undergoing Court-of-Law examinations. The analysis was conducted on an audio/textual corpus that extends the one provided by the DIKE project. We found that most of crises (more than 80%) were characterized by babblings. Thus, we tried to characterize babblings looking at low-level acoustic features –such as speech pauses, word durations, intensity/pitch contours, intensity/pitch mean values– and found interesting results. Then we analyzed words in babblings, highlighting semantic roles and grammatical typologies; and again we found interesting clues. We conclude that in stressful setting, as Court- of-Law examinations, during crises, babblings exhibit a precise behavior, in terms of both acoustic and grammatical features

Towards Automatic Recognition of Prosody

The term prosody defines the group of audio paralinguistic and suprasegmental cues involved in the communicative and under- standing process of human speech. This paper presents our approach to automatic recognition of prosodic forms. In par- ticular, we present: CALLIOPE, a multi-dimensional and ab- stract model, aiming at categorising all prosodic forms; SI- CALLIOPE, a sub-space for which we defined a corpus of recorder prosodic forms; and the psychoacoustic experiment we are currently carrying on for investigating main acous- tic behaviours and features involved into the discrimination of prosodic forms. The experiment results will be useful for defining the feature set to rely on for automatic recognition of prosodies. For that reason, we are also defining a classifier, based on Neural Nets. This study is part of the LYV project, which focuses on improving prosodic expressiveness skills of Italian speakers with autism and other cognitive disabilities