Call for Papers: 7th Laughter and Other Non-Verbal Vocalisations Workshop - July 16-17 2024

We are excited to announce the 7th Laughter and Other Non-Verbal Vocalisations Workshop (bit.ly/LaughterWorkshop2024) on July 16-17 at Queen’s University Belfast. The workshop will be a pre-conference event, part of the 2024 Conference of the International Society for Research on Emotion (www.isre2024.org).

Non-verbal vocalisations in human-human and human-machine interactions play important roles in displaying social and affective behaviours and in managing the flow of interaction. Laughter, sighs, clicks, filled pauses, and short utterances such as feedback responses are among some of the non-verbal vocalisations that are being increasingly studied from various research fields. However, much is still unknown about the phonetic or visual characteristics of non-verbal vocalisations (production/encoding), their relations to the social actions they are part of, their perceived meanings (perception/decoding), and their ordering in interaction. Furthermore, with the increased interest for more naturalness in human-machine interaction, current times also invite exploring how these phenomena can be integrated in speech applications.

Research themes include, but are not restricted to, these aspects of laughter and other non-verbal vocalisations:

• Articulation, acoustics, and perception

• Interaction and pragmatics

• Affective and evaluative meanings

• Social perception and organisation

• Disfluency

• Technology applications

Researchers are invited to submit extended abstracts (2 pages long, including figures and references) describing their work, including work in progress. The deadline for submission is March 15th, 2024. More information about the submission process can be found on our website (bit.ly/LaughterWorkshop2024).

There will be two keynote presentations on the topics treated by the workshop, delivered by Prof. Carolyn McGettigan (University College London, UK) and Prof. Margaret Zellers (Kiel University, Germany).

Looking forward to receiving your contributions and welcoming you at the workshop in July!