Paolo Roseano

Communicating Epistemic Stance: How Speech and Gesture Patterns Reflect Epistemicity and Evidentiality.

This study investigates how epistemic stance is encoded and perceived in face-to-face communication when language is regarded as comprised by speech and gesture. Two studies were conducted with this goal in mind. The first study consisted of a production task in which participants performed opinion reports. Results showed that speakers communicate epistemic stance both verbally and non-verbally, and that specific prosodic and gestural patterns are used to express different epistemic and evidential meanings. The second study consisted of a rating task in which listeners rated the degree of certainty expressed by the opinion reports. Results showed that the number of gestural high certainty markers used by a speaker was a good predictor of the perception of epistemic high certainty. We thus claim that prosodic and gestural markers can be regarded as overt manifestations of epistemicity and evidentiality, and they appear to be especially effective in the communication of epistemic stance.

CALCU-DISTA: UNA HERRAMIENTA PARA EL ANÁLISIS DIALECTOMÉTRICO DE LA VARIACIÓN ENTONATIVA

espanolDurante las ultimas decadas, el tamano de las bases de datos que contienen datos sobre la variacion diatopica de la prosodia ha aumentado considerablemente. Por esta razon, los investigadores necesitan instrumentos y metodos estadisticos adecuados para hacer frente a esa enorme cantidad de informacion. Este trabajo pretende describir Calcu-Dista, una herramienta cuyo objetivo es llevar a cabo un analisis dialectometrico de datos entonativos acusticos en el marco del proyecto AMPER. Ademas de describir como funciona CalcuDista, este articulo proporciona la validacion de sus resultados. EnglishDuring the last few decades, the size of databases containing data about prosodic diatopic variation has increased dramatically. For this reason, researchers need adequate statistical methods and tools to cope with such huge amount of information. This paper aims at describing Calcu-Dista, a tool whose aim is carrying out a dialectometric analysis of acoustic intonational data within the framework of the AMPER project. In addition to describing how Calcu-Dista works, this paper provides validation of its results.

A tool for automatic transcription of intonation: Eti_ToBI a ToBI transcriber for Spanish and Catalan

This article presents Eti_ToBI, a tool that automatically labels intonational events in Spanish and Catalan utterances according to the Sp_ToBI and Cat_ToBI current conventions. The system consists in a Praat script that assigns ToBI labels to pitch movements basing the assignments on lexical data introduced by the researcher and the acoustical data that it extracts from sound files. The first part of the article explains the methodological approach that has made possible the automatisation and describes the algorithms used by the script to perform the analysis. The second part presents the reliability results for both Catalan and Spanish corpora showing a level of agreement equal to the one shown by human transcribers among them in the literature.

Contacto lingüístico y transferencia prosódica bajo una perspectiva diacrónica: El caso del alguerés

Abstract The article focuses on some intonational features of three Romance languages spoken in northern Sardinia (Algherese Catalan, Logudorese Sardinian, and the Sardinian regional variety of Italian). The first part of the article shows, by means of both qualitative and quantitative analyses, that the above-mentioned languages share some intonational features that are not present in the dialects of Catalan and Italian spoken in the Iberian Peninsula and the Italian Peninsula, respectively. In the following sections the article puts forward a diachronic explanation for this intonational convergence, basing on the role of Sardinian as a substrate language for both Algherese Catalan and the regional Italian of Sardinia. The final part of the article proposes a generalization of the findings of the case-study and puts forward a diachronic model of prosodic transfer that includes the mechanisms of direct transfer, fusion, and accommodation.

Comparació automàtica de veus amb finalitats judicials a partir de l’espectre mitjà a llarg termini: el cas dels parlants bilingües

En aquest article presentem un metode de comparacio automatica de veus a partir de l’analisi del parametre acustic de l’espectre mitja a llarg termini (conegut com a LTAS, de l’angles Long Term Average Spectrum ) a partir de dades de parlants bilingues. Els resultats de les proves de laboratori indiquen que aquesta tecnica te una utilitat judicial ja que pot proporcionar al perit elements valuosos per a la comparacio de veus.