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Statistical methods of describing prosody were used to study fluency, expressiveness, and their relationship among 8-10-year-old readers. Children were rated on fluency and expressiveness. The two were partially independent in the full sample. A balanced subsample was selected for closer instrumental and statistical analysis. (Author/VWL)

Two channels have been distinguished in human interaction: one transmits explicit messages, which may be about anything or nothing; the other transmits implicit messages about the speakers themselves. Both linguistics and technology have invested enormous efforts in understanding the first, explicit channel, but the second is not as well understood. Understanding the other party's emotions is one of the key tasks associated with the second, implicit channel. To tackle that task, signal processing and analysis techniques have to be developed, while, at the same time, consolidating psychological and linguistic analyses of emotion. This article examines basic issues in those areas. It is motivated by the PKYSTA project, in which we aim to develop a hybrid system capable of using information from faces and voices to recognize people's emotions [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the literature, politeness has been researched within many disciplines. Although Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness (1978, 1987) is often cited, it is primarily a linguistic theory and has been criticized for its lack of generalizability to all cultures. Consequently, there is a need for a more comprehensive approach to understand and explain politeness. We suggest applying a social signal framework that considers politeness as a communicative state. By doing so, we aim to unify and explain politeness and its corresponding research and identify further research needed in this area.

There has been rapid development in conceptions of the kind of database that is needed for emotion research. Familiar archetypes are still influential, but the state of the art has moved beyond them. There is concern to capture emotion as it occurs in action and interaction ('pervasive emotion') as well as in short episodes dominated by emotion, and therefore in a range of contexts, which shape the way it is expressed. Context links to modality-different contexts favour different modalities. The strategy of using acted data is not suited to those aims, and has been supplemented by work on both fully natural emotion and emotion induced by various technique that allow more controlled records. Applications for that kind of work go far beyond the 'trouble shooting' that has been the focus for application: 'really natural language processing' is a key goal. The descriptions included in such a database ideally cover quality, emotional content, emotion-related signals and signs, and context. Several schemes are emerging as candidates for describing pervasive emotion. The major contemporary databases are listed, emphasising those which are naturalistic or induced, multimodal, and influential.

A study of business telephone cells provides quantitative evidence suggesting "intonational settings": Certain attributes of intonation are sustained throughout discourse units in the calls (openings, business transactions, preclosures, and final closures), and differentiate one unit from another, as if phonologically significant aspects of intonation are realized within a space controlled by discourse-related parameters. Two types of parameter emerge, one controlling the midpoint of the F0 contour in frequency space, the other controlling the way it fluctuates.