The entropy of intoxicated speech - lexical creativity and heavy tongues

Spontaneous speech produced in sober and intoxicated conditions has been compared in information theoretic terms on the phoneme and word level to examine phonological and lexical aspects of intoxication. Word level entropy has been calculated to capture roughly the effect of alcohol on cognitive lexical creativity. Phoneme level entropy is intended to reflect heavy tongue influences on phoneme combinations. Moreover, mispronunciations have been investigated by relating canonical to realised pronunciation by means of mutual information and the Levenshtein distance. To account for the gradual nature of intoxication, examinations have been carried out regarding the offsets and slopes of linear functions mapping the blood alcohol concentration to the information theoretic variables. It turned out that male speakers compensate less for the alcohol-induced degradations with regard to lexical creativity and articulatory precision than female speakers. Furthermore, the pronunciation of male speakers generally deviates more from canonical forms

Exploring the connection of acoustic and distinctive features

This study is a contribution to link the abstract phonological level to the acoustic signal level by identifying the main acoustic correlates for the distinctive feature set developed by Chomsky and Halle (1968). The acoustic features were extracted by the openSMILE toolkit from spontaneous speech data. For each distinctive feature a set of closely related acoustic features was derived by means of correlation-based feature selection. Based on the respective acoustic feature pools C4.5 trees and support vector machines for binary feature classification were trained. The classification performance ranged from 76 to 89% for vocalic features and from 78 to 93% for consonantal features. The methods proposed in this study can be of use to identify systematic speech signal correspondencies for phonological models and as a starting point for distinctive feature detection in speech recognition

A dialect distance metric based on string and temporal alignment

The Levenshtein distance is an established metric to represent phonological distances between dialects. So far, this metric has usually been applied on manually transcribed word lists. In this study we introduce several extensions of the Levenshtein distance by incorporating probabilistic edit costs as well as temporal alignment costs. We tested all variants for compliance with the axioms that within-dialect utterance pairs are phonologically more similar than across-dialect ones. In contrast to former studies we are not applying the metrics on preselected, prototypical word lists but on real connected speech data which was automatically segmented and labeled. It turned out, that the transcription edit distances already performed well in reflecting the difference between within- and across-dialect comparisons, and that the adding of a temporal component rather weakens the performance of the metrics

German Alcohol Language Corpus -the Question of Dialect

Abstract Speech uttered under the influence of alcohol is known to deviate from the speech of the same person when sober. This is an important feature in forensic investigations and could also be used to detect intoxication in the automotive environment. Aside from acoustic-phonetic features and speech content which have already been studied by others in this contribution we address the question whether speakers use dialectal variation or dialect words more frequently when intoxicated than when sober. We analyzed 300,000 recorded word tokens in read and spontaneous speech uttered by 162 female and male speakers within the German Alcohol Language Corpus. We found that contrary to our expectations the frequency of dialectal forms decreases significantly when speakers are under the influence. We explain this effect with a compensatory over-shoot mechanism: speakers are aware of their intoxication and that they are being monitored. In forensic analysis of speech this "awareness factor" must be taken into account

How the COVID-19 Pandemic Changes the Subjective Perception of Meaning Related to Different Areas of Life in Austrian Psychotherapists and Patients

We assessed psychotherapists’ and patients’ ratings of their subjective perception of meaning related to different areas of life before the COVID-19 pandemic as compared to the time during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a quantitative cross-sectional study, Austrian psychotherapists (N = 222) were recruited by e-mail, who in turn recruited their patients (N = 139). Therapists and patients were asked to rate the meaning of different areas of life before as well as during the COVID-19 crisis. The psychotherapists showed an overall higher rating of the importance of areas of life compared to their patients (p < 0.001). The rating of the importance of the domains of living was differently affected by the COVID-19 situation (p < 0.001). While the meaning of physical and mental health during COVID-19 was rated higher than before, the opposite was observed for work (p < 0.001). No differences were found for relationships and friends, as well as for hobbies. As no interactions between perspective (therapists vs. patients), area of life, and time point (before vs. during COVID-19) were observed, it can be concluded that the COVID-19 situation changed the subjective attribution of meaning concerning different aspects of life similarly in therapists as well as patients. While mental and physical health gained subjective importance, the opposite was observed for work

Telephone Emergency Service 142 (TelefonSeelsorge) during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-Sectional Survey among Counselors in Austria

Telephone emergency services play an important role in providing low-threshold, anonymous crisis intervention free of cost. The current study aims to examine the mental well-being and perceived stress level of counselors as well as the main topics of helpline callers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Austria. In the current study, 374 counselors were recruited within the Austrian nationwide organization TelefonSeelsorge during the second wave of COVID-19 infection in Austria. The mental well-being (WHO-5) and perceived stress-level (PSS-10) were assessed and counselors were asked about the frequency of different topics thematized by callers and changes compared to pre-pandemic times. Compared to a reference group of the Austrian general population, counselors experienced less stress (13.22 vs. 16.42) and higher mental well-being (66.26 vs. 57.36; p < 0.001). The most frequent topics during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Austria were loneliness and mental health. More calls were registered in 2020 compared to 2019 and especially the topics loneliness, mental health, professional activities and relationships were reported to be thematized more often during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the time before (p < 0.001). The results contribute to an understanding of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on telephone crisis intervention