Language variation and change
Speaker: Lauren Hall-Lew (University of Edinburgh)
Title: Phonetic Cues to Depression: A Sociolinguistic Perspective
Abstract: Despite a very large literature on the acoustic cues to clinical depression, there are no known analyses that consider a sociophonetic perspective. While some papers describe the basic demographics of the participants, and some also elicit speech from varying speech tasks, no studies consider the roles of identity, style, or social meaning. At the same time, work in sociophonetics, including work on speech communities experiencing collective trauma, is seemingly unaware of this clinical work. This talk is a work-in-progress towards a paper which will: (1) review clinical work on depression detection in the speech signal, (2) review sociophonetic work on affect and embodiment, and (3) consider the implications each field has for the other. The goal of the paper is to encourage a more sociophonetically informed approach to clinical studies and a more clinically informed approach to sociophonetic research.
Contact details
Language variation and change
Room G.01, 50 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LH