Marcin Włodarczak

The ALICO corpus: analysing the active listener

The Active Listening Corpus (ALICO) is a multimodal data set of spontaneous dyadic conversations in German with diverse speech and gestural annotations of both dialogue partners. The annotations consist of short feedback expression transcriptions with corresponding communicative function interpretations as well as segmentations of interpausal units, words, rhythmic prominence intervals and vowel-to-vowel intervals. Additionally, ALICO contains head gesture annotations of both interlocutors. The corpus contributes to research on spontaneous human–human interaction, on functional relations between modalities, and timing variability in dialogue. It also provides data that differentiates between distracted and attentive listeners. We describe the main characteristics of the corpus and briefly present the most important results obtained from analyses in recent years.

Exhalatory markers of turn completion

The paper is a study of kinematic features of the exhalation which signal that the speaker is done speaking and wants to yield the turn. We demonstrate that the single most prominent feature is the ...This paper is a study of kinematic features of the exhalation which signal that the speaker is done speaking and wants to yield the turn. We demonstrate that the single most prominent feature is th ...

Respiratory Constraints in Verbal and Non-verbal Communication

In the present paper we address the old question of respiratory planning in speech production. We recast the problem in terms of speakers communicative goals and propose that speakers try to minimize respiratory effort in line with the H&H theory. We analyze respiratory cycles coinciding with no speech (i.e., silence), short verbal feedback expressions (SFEs) as well as longer vocalizations in terms of parameters of the respiratory cycle and find little evidence for respiratory planning in feedback production. We also investigate timing of speech and SFEs in the exhalation and contrast it with nods. We find that while speech is strongly tied to the exhalation onset, SFEs are distributed much more uniformly throughout the exhalation and are often produced on residual air. Given that nods, which do not have any respiratory constraints, tend to be more frequent toward the end of an exhalation, we propose a mechanism whereby respiratory patterns are determined by the trade-off between speakers communicative goals and respiratory constraints.