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We have the pleasure to announce a forthcoming workshop in Berlin at the end of February 2009. This will be a follow-up to the successful international workshop on the "Phonetics of Laughter" that was held in Saarbrücken (Germany) in 2007. The dynamics of human vocal interaction is proving to be an important field of study in many diverse disciplines from discourse analysis to social robotics and beyond. Laughter is a typical example of an understudied phenomenon in this dynamics, and there are many other vocalisations with similar importance for organising social interaction, e.g., giving feedback, organising turntaking, signalling social bonding. These are proving essential components of human-machine interfaces and explanations of social phonetic behaviour. The goal of the workshop is to bring together scientists from diverse fields in order to provide an exchange forum for interdisciplinary discussions. The structure of the workshop provides a balance between invited talks, tutorials with practical hands-on experience, as well as scientific research results and poster presentations. Those working in the field were invited to submit reports of their findings (including unfinished work in progress) for inclusion as oral and poster presentations so that many aspects of the interdisciplinary subject may be discussed. Abstracts were especially welcome from the following fields: active listening, animal behaviour, conversational analysis, discourse synchrony, expression of affect, human-machine interaction, linguistics & paralinguistics, phonetics, psychology, nonverbal behaviour, robotics and virtual agents.
Selected submissions will be considered for inclusion in a peer-review publication in an expanded form at a later date.
Jürgen Trouvain and Nick Campbell
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