Child-directed spoken data is the ideal source of support for claims about children’s linguistic environments. However, phonological transcriptions of child-directed speech are scarce,compared to sources like adult-directed speech or text data. Acquiring reliable descriptions of children’s phonological environments from more readily accessible sources would mean considerable savings of time and money. The first step towards this goal is to quantify the reliability of descriptions derived from such secondary sources. We investigate how phonological distributions vary across different modalities (spoken vs. written), and across the age of the intended audience (children vs. adults). Using a previously unseen collection of Swedish adult- and child-directed spoken and written data, we combine lexicon look-up and grapheme-to-phonemeconversion to approximate phonological characteristics. The analysis shows distributional differences across datasets both for single phonemes and for longer phoneme sequences. Some of these are predictably attributed to lexical and contextual characteristics of text vs. speech.The generated phonological transcriptions are remarkably reliable. The differences in phonological distributions between child-directed speech and secondary sources highlight a need for compensatory measures when relying on written data or onadult-directed spoken data, and/or for continued collection ofactual child-directed speech in research on children’s language environments.

This paper attempts to draw attention of the multimodal communication research community to what we consider a long overdue topic, namely respiratory activity in conversation. We submit that a turn towards spontaneous interaction is a natural extension of the recent interest in speech breathing, and is likely to offer valuable insights into mechanisms underlying organisation of interaction and collaborative human action in general, as well as to make advancement in existing speech technology applications. Particular focus is placed on the role of breathing as a perceptually and interactionally salient turn-taking cue. We also present the recording setup developed in the Phonetics Laboratory at Stockholm University with the aim of studying communicative functions of physiological and audio-visual breathing correlates in spontaneous multiparty interactions

This study investigates timing of communicative behaviour with respect to speaker’s respiratory cycle. The data is drawn from a corpus of multiparty conversations in Swedish. We find that while longer utterances (> 1 s) are tied, predictably, primarily to exhalation onset, shorter vocalisations are spread more uni- formly across the respiratory cycle. In addition, nods, which are free from any respiratory constraints, are most frequently found around exhalation offsets, where respiratory requirements for even a short utterance are not satisfied. We interpret the results to reflect the economy principle in speech production, whereby respiratory effort, associated primarily with starting a new respiratory cycle, is minimised within the scope of speaker’s communicative goals. 

The paper describes the design of a novel multimodal corpus of spontaneous multiparty conversations in Swedish. The corpus is collected with the primary goal of investigating the role of breathing and its perceptual cues for interactive control of interaction. Physiological correlates of breathing are captured by means of respiratory belts, which measure changes in cross sectional area of the rib cage and the abdomen. Additionally, auditory and visual correlates of breathing are recorded in parallel to the actual conversations. The corpus allows studying respiratory mechanisms underlying organisation of spontaneous conversation, especially in connection with turn management. As such, it is a valuable resource both for fundamental research and speech techonology applications.

Even though we may not be aware of it, much breathing in face-to-face conversation is both clearly audible and visible. Consequently, it has been suggested that respiratory activity is used in the joint coordination of conversational flow. For instance, it has been claimed that inhalation is an interactionally salient cue to speech initiation, that exhalation is a turn yielding device, and that breath holding is a marker of turn incompleteness (e.g. Local & Kelly, 1986; Schegloff, 1996). So far, however, few studies have addressed the interactional aspects of breathing (one notable exeption is McFarland, 2001). In this poster, we will describe our ongoing efforts to fill this gap. We will present the design of a novel corpus of respiratory activity in spontaneous multiparty face-to-face conversations in Swedish. The corpus will contain physiological measurements relevant to breathing, high-quality audio, and video. Minimally, the corpus will be annotated with interactional events derived from voice activity detection and (semi-) automatically detected inhalation and exhalation events in the respiratory data. We will also present initial analyses of the material collected. The question is whether breathing is prosody and relevant to this symposium? What we do know is that the turntaking phenomena that of particular interest to us are closely (almost by definition) related to several prosodic phenomena, and in particular to those associated with prosodic phrasing, grouping and boundaries. Thus, we will learn more about respiratory activity in phrasing (and the like) through analyses of breathing in conversation. References Local, John K., & Kelly, John. (1986). Projection and 'silences': Notes on phonetic and conversational structure. Human Studies, 9, 185-204. McFarland, David H. (2001). Respiratory markers of conversational interaction. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 44, 128-143. Schegloff, E. A. (1996). Turn organization: One intersection of grammar and interaction. In E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Interaction and Grammar (pp. 52-133), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This paper explores durational aspects of pauses gaps and overlaps in three different conversational corpora with a view to challenge claims about precision timing in turn-taking Distributions of pause gap and overlap durations in conversations are presented and methodological issues regarding the statistical treatment of such distributions are discussed The results are related to published minimal response times for spoken utterances and thresholds for detection of acoustic silences in speech It is shown that turn-taking is generally less precise than is often claimed by researchers in the field of conversation analysis or interactional linguistics These results are discussed in the light of their implications for models of timing in turn-taking and for interaction control models in speech technology In particular it is argued that the proportion of speaker changes that could potentially be triggered by information immediately preceding the speaker change is large enough for reactive interaction controls models to be viable in speech technology.