Prosodic and Segmental Correlates of Spontaneous Dutch Speech in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease:A Pilot Study

This study investigates the acoustic correlates of prosody and vowel articulation in Dutch individuals with Parkinson’s Disease (PD). We compared prosodic and segmental acoustic measures in spontaneous monologues in PD patients to those in elderly healthy controls matched for age and gender. For the prosodic measurements of pitch variability, span and speech rate, we analysed fundamental frequency and intensity. For articulation measurements, the first two formants were calculated from Dutch corner vowels extracted from the speech signal. Results show a monopitch trend, reduced speech rate, centralization of the formant frequencies and reduced first formant variability in individuals with PD compared to control group

What is Salience?

A commonly used concept in linguistics is salience. Oftentimes it is used without definition, and the meaning of the concept is repeatedly assumed to be self-explanatory. The definitions that are provided may vary greatly from one operationalization of salience to the next. In order to find out whether it is possible to postulate an overarching working definition of linguistic salience that subsumes usage across linguistic subdomains, we review these different operationalizations of linguistic salience. This article focuses on salience in sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, second-language acquisition (SLA), and semantics. In this article, we give an overview of how these fields operationalize salience. Finally, we discuss correlations and contradictions between the different operationalizations

Deep CNN-based Inductive Transfer Learning for Sarcasm Detection in Speech

Sarcasm is a frequently used linguistic device which is expressed in a multitude of ways, both with acoustic cues (including pitch, intonation, intensity, etc.) and visual cues (including facial expression, eye gaze, etc.). While cues used in the expression of sarcasm are well-described in the literature, there is a striking paucity of attempts to perform automatic sarcasm detection in speech. To explore this gap, we elaborate a methodology of implementing Inductive Transfer Learning (ITL) based on pre-trained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) to detect sarcasm in speech. To those ends, the multimodal dataset MUStARD is used as a target dataset in this study. The two selected pre-trained DCNN models used are Xception and VGGish, which we trained on visual and audio datasets. Results show that VGGish, which is applied as a feature extractor in the experiment, performs better than Xception, which has its convolutional layers and pooling layers retrained. Both models achieve a higher F-score compared to the baseline Support Vector Machines (SVM) model by 7% and 5% in unimodal sarcasm detection in speech

Verbal art as heuristic for semantic analyses:How non-prosodic poetic structure in the verbal art of Muylaq’ Aymara (Muylaque, Peru)

International audienceAymara is an Amerindian language spoken mainly in Peru and Bolivia. To date, relatively little is documented about Aymara verbal art. Accordingly, we analyze a traditional song recorded in the Peruvian highlands. We provide a musical and linguistic analysis of the non-prosodic poetic song structure. We detail the octosyllabic, homeoteleutonic (that is, the final words in a line have the same endings) strategies for line formation, the melodic and rhythmic characteristics, and outline the syntactic, morphological, and semantic strategies used in forming semantic couplets. This reveals semantic categories which would not be apparent in a traditional linguistic analysis. Furthermore, the musical analysis confirms previous works on the misperception of a musical anacrusis. We conclude that rigorous, scientific analyses of verbal art require consideration of the construction of meaning through practice and dialogO Aimará é uma língua que é falada principalmente no Peru e na Bolívia. Até o momento, relativamente pouco foi documentado sobre a arte verbal aimará. Nesse sentido, analisamos uma canção tradicional gravada no altiplano peruano. Oferecemos uma análise musical e linguística da estrutura poética não prosódica da canção. Fornecemos detalhes sobre as figuras retóricas / literárias utilizadas para a produção / formação dos versos: a) o verso octossilábico, b) o homeoteleuton (este último é uma figura retórica que consiste na semelhança no final das palavras finais dos versos) e c) as características melódicas e rítmicas. Também delineamos as estratégias sintáticas, morfológicas e semânticas utilizadas/usadas/presentes na formação dos pares semânticos. Isto revela categorias semânticas que não seriam evidentes / não se manifestariam em uma análise linguística tradicional. Além disso, a análise musical confirma as observações de trabalhos anteriores sobre a percepção equivocada de uma anacruse musical. Concluímos que análises rigorosas e científicas da arte verbal requerem considerar a construção de significados por meio da prática e do diálogo