Acoustic and grammatical characterization of crisis-related babblings in Italian persons undergoing Courts-of-Law examinations

This work investigates babblings during crises in Italian persons undergoing Court-of-Law examinations. The analysis was conducted on an audio/textual corpus that extends the one provided by the DIKE project. We found that most of crises (more than 80%) were characterized by babblings. Thus, we tried to characterize babblings looking at low-level acoustic features –such as speech pauses, word durations, intensity/pitch contours, intensity/pitch mean values– and found interesting results. Then we analyzed words in babblings, highlighting semantic roles and grammatical typologies; and again we found interesting clues. We conclude that in stressful setting, as Court- of-Law examinations, during crises, babblings exhibit a precise behavior, in terms of both acoustic and grammatical features.