- Sitzungsleitung: Oliver Niebuhr -
Phonetic research in the 20th century was primarily characterized by describing and modeling the production and perception of words and their constituting elements, the phonemes. Considerable progress has been made in these areas. In addition, the invention of computers and the subsequent digital revolution provided speech scientists with new opportunities - in terms of quality, quantity, and ecological validity - for eliciting, storing, and analyzing communication, and at the same time created new ways for the users of language to talk to each other and to machines. It is partly for these reasons that speech research in the 21st century saw a shift in focus from speech as a means of information exchange to speech as a means of interaction and identity, or, in other words, a context-sensitive carrier of social and physiological signals. Questions addressed with regard to these signals range from charisma, dominance, and other indicators of social hierarchy, through irony, laughter, attitudes, affection and emotion through to the various aspects of speaker state, identity, health, vocal comfort, and effort. With special emphasis on acoustics, the structured session at the DAGA conference provides its interdisciplinary audience with selected insights into these questions. The resulting overview illustrates the variety of speech science in the 21st century and the new application potential that research on social and physiological signals holds for people's daily lives. In this way, the session is meant to be a forum that brings together speech scientists and engineers and inspires them to jointly discuss and develop innovative ideas and solutions, for example, in the areas of healthcare, homecare, social services, human-machine-interaction, speech enhancement technologies, digital and intercultural communication, language teaching, as well as leadership, management, and marketing.