No laughing matter. An investigation into the acoustic cues marking the use of laughter

Ludusan B, Wagner P. No laughing matter. An investigation into the acoustic cues marking the use of laughter. In: Proceedings of ICPhS. 2019.Laughter is a paralinguistic phenomenon widely used in human communication. Previous studies on laughter have mainly looked at its acoustic realization and its functions, leaving the context in which laughter occurs relatively under-studied. We intend to partially fill this gap by conducting an investigation into the acoustic cues that mark the use of laughter. We focus on the syllables preceding laughter and we explore several relevant spectral features. The results obtained on an American English corpus of conversational speech show anticipatory effects on the syllable immediately preceding laughter: a higher F1, a higher spectral center of gravity and a greater spectral standard deviation. We discuss these findings in terms of the individual variation present in laughter

Speech, laughter and everything in between: A modulation spectrum-based analysis

Ludusan B, Wagner P. Speech, laughter and everything in between: A modulation spectrum-based analysis. In: Proceedings. 10th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2020. 25-28 May 2020, Tokyo, Japan. ISCA; 2020: 995-999.Laughter and speech-laughs are pervasive phenomena found in conversational speech. Nevertheless, few previous studies have compared their acoustic realization to speech. We investigated in this work the suprasegmental characteristics of these two phenomena in relation to speech, by means of a modulation spectrum analysis. Two types of modulation spectra, one encoding the variation of the envelope of the signal and the other one its temporal fine structure, were considered. Using a corpus of spontaneous dyadic interactions, we computed the modulation index spectrum and the f0 spectrum of the three classes of vocalizations considered and we fitted separate generalized additive mixed models for them. The results obtained for the former modulation showed a clear separation between speech, on the one hand, and laughter and speech-laugh, on the other hand, while the f0 spectrum was able to discriminate between all three classes. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of these findings and their implication for laughter detection

An Evaluation of Manual and Semi-Automatic Laughter Annotation

Ludusan B, Wagner P. An Evaluation of Manual and Semi-Automatic Laughter Annotation. In: Proceedings of Interspeech 2020. ISCA; 2020: 621-625.With laughter research seeing a development in recent years, there is also an increased need in materials having laughter annotations. We examine in this study how one can leverage existing spontaneous speech resources to this goal. We first analyze the process of manual laughter annotation in corpora, by establishing two important parameters of the process: the amount of time required and its inter-rater reliability. Next, we propose a novel semi-automatic tool for laughter annotation, based on a signal-based representation of speech rhythm. We test both annotation approaches on the same recordings, containing German dyadic spontaneous interactions, and employing a larger pool of annotators than previously done. We then compare and discuss the obtained results based on the two aforementioned parameters, highlighting the benefits and costs associated to each approach

A Distributional Analysis of Laughter Across Turns and Utterances

We present here a study on the use of laughter in spontaneous interactions, examining its distribution across two linguistic levels: utterances and turns. A multilingual corpus of dyadic conversations was employed, containing recordings in French, German and Mandarin Chinese. Laughter was coded based on its position inside the analysis unit and its distribution with respect to the event type and the language was analyzed. The results showed that laughter distribution is modulated by the linguistic level, as well as by the laughter event type. Moreover, differences between languages seem to depend on the analysis level

A Distributional Analysis of Laughter Across Turns and Utterances

We present here a study on the use of laughter in spontaneous interactions, examining its distribution across two linguistic levels: utterances and turns. A multilingual corpus of dyadic conversations was employed, containing recordings in French, German and Mandarin Chinese. Laughter was coded based on its position inside the analysis unit and its distribution with respect to the event type and the language was analyzed. The results showed that laughter distribution is modulated by the linguistic level, as well as by the laughter event type. Moreover, differences between languages seem to depend on the analysis level

Does information-structural acoustic prosody change under different visibility conditions?

Wagner P, Bryhadyr N, Schröer M, Ludusan B. Does information-structural acoustic prosody change under different visibility conditions? In: Proceedings of ICPhS. 2019.It is well-known that the effort invested in prosodic expression can be adjusted to the information structure in a message, but also to the characteristics of the transmission channel. To investigate wether visibly accessible cues to information structure or facial prosodic expression have a differentiated impact on acoustic prosody, we modified the visibility conditions in a spontaneous dyadic interaction task, i.e. a verbalized version of TicTacToe. The main hypothesis was that visibly accessible cues should lead to a decrease in prosodic effort. While we found that - as expected - information structure is expressed throughout a number of acoustic-prosodic cues, visible accessibility to context information makes accents shorter, while accessability to an interlocutor's facial expression slightly increases the mean F0 of an accent

Laughter Dynamics in Dyadic Conversations

Ludusan B, Wagner P. Laughter Dynamics in Dyadic Conversations. In: Proceedings of Interspeech. 2019.Human verbal communication is a complex phenomenon involving dynamics that normally result in the alignment of participants on several modalities, and across various linguistic domains. We examined here whether such dynamics occur also for paralinguistic events, in particular, in the case of laughter. Using a conversational corpus containing dyadic interactions in three languages (French, German and Mandarin Chinese), we investigated three measures of alignment: convergence, synchrony and agreement. Support for convergence and synchrony was found in all three languages, although the level of support varied with the language, while the agreement in laughter type was found to be significant for the German data. The implications of these findings towards a better understanding of the role of laughter in human communication are discussed

Are words easier to learn from infant- than adult-directed speech? A quantitative corpus-based investigation

We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented before for phonemes, the realizations of words are more variable and less discriminable in IDS than in ADS. At the phonological level, we find an effect in the opposite direction: the IDS lexicon contains more distinctive words (such as onomatopoeias) than the ADS counterpart. Combining the acoustic and phonological metrics together in a global discriminability score reveals that the bigger separation of lexical categories in the phonological space does not compensate for the opposite effect observed at the acoustic level. As a result, IDS word forms are still globally less discriminable than ADS word forms, even though the effect is numerically small. We discuss the implication of these findings for the view that the functional role of IDS is to improve language learnability.Comment: Draf

Motif discovery in infant-and adult-directed speech

Abstract Infant-directed speech (IDS) is thought to play a key role in determining infant language acquisition. It is thus important to describe how computational models of infant language acquisition behave when given an input of IDS, as compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). In this paper, we explore how an acoustic motif discovery algorithm fares when presented with speech from both registers. Results show small but significant differences in performance, with lower recall and lower cluster collocation in IDS than ADS, but a higher cluster purity in IDS. Overall, these results are inconsistent with a view suggesting that IDS is acoustically clearer than ADS in a way that systematically facilitates lexical recognition. Similarities and differences with human infants' word segmentation are discussed