Acoustic and grammatical characterization of crisis-related babblings in Italian persons undergoing Courts-of-Law examinations

Conference: Speech Communication - 12. ITG-Fachtagung Sprachkommunikation
10/05/2016 - 10/07/2016 at Paderborn, Deutschland

Proceedings: Speech Communication

Pages: 4Language: englishTyp: PDF

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Authors:
Sbattella, Licia; Tedesco, Roberto; Cenceschi, Sonia (ARCSLab, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milan, Italy)

Abstract:
This work investigates babblings during crises in Italian persons undergoing Court-of-Law examinations. The analysis was conducted on an audio/textual corpus that extends the one provided by the DIKE project. We found that most of crises (more than 80%) were characterized by babblings. Thus, we tried to characterize babblings looking at low-level acoustic features – such as speech pauses, word durations, intensity/pitch contours, intensity/pitch mean values – and found interesting results. Then we analyzed words in babblings, highlighting semantic roles and grammatical typologies; and again we found interesting clues. We conclude that in stressful setting, as Courtof- Law examinations, during crises, babblings exhibit a precise behavior, in terms of both acoustic and grammatical features.