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In this study we present initial efforts to model laughter with an articulatory speech synthesizer. We aimed at imitating a real laugh taken from a spontaneous speech database and created several synthetic versions of it using articulatory synthesis and diphone synthesis. In modeling laughter with articulatory synthesis, we also approximated features like breathing noises that do not normally occur in speech. Evaluation with respect to the perceived degree of naturalness indicated that the laugh stimuli would pass as "laughs'; in an appropriate conversational context. In isolation, though, significant differences could be measured with regard to the degree of variation (durational patterning, fundamental frequency, intensity) within each laugh.

Smiling is a visible expression and it has been shown that it is audible too. The aim of this paper is to investigate the perception of the prosody of smile in 2 different languages. In order to elicitate smiled speech, 6 speakers of Québec French were required to read sentences displayed with or without caricatures. The sentences produced were used as stimuli for a perception test administered to 10 listeners of Québec French and 10 listeners of German who had no knowledge of French. Results suggest that some prosodic cues are universals and others are culture specific.