Roxane Bertrand

About the relationship between eyebrow movements and Fo variations

Speech production is always accompanied by facial and gestural activity. The study is part of a broader research project on how head movements and facial expressions are related to voice variations in different speech situations. Ten normal subjects were recorded while reading aloud answering yes/no questions, and dialoguing with an interviewer. Rapid rising-falling eyebrow movements produced by the subjects as they spoke were associated with Fo rises in only 71% of the cases. This suggests that eyebrow movements and fundamental frequency changes are not automatically linked (i.e., they are not the result of muscular synergy), but are more a consequence of linguistic and communicational choices. Note also that 38% of the eyebrow movements were produced while the subject was not speaking. Thus, eyebrow movements may also serve as back-channel signals or play a role in turn-taking during conversation.

A SIP of CoFee : A Sample of Interesting Productions of Conversational Feedback

Feedback utterances are among the most frequent in dialogue. Feedback is also a crucial aspect of linguistic theories that take social interaction, involving lan- guage, into account. This paper introduces the corpora and datasets of a project scru- tinizing this kind of feedback utterances in French. We present the genesis of the cor- pora (for a total of about 16 hours of tran- scribed and phone force-aligned speech) involved in the project. We introduce the resulting datasets and discuss how they are being used in on-going work with focus on the form-function relationship of conver- sational feedback. All the corpora created and the datasets produced in the frame- work of this project will be made available for research purposes.