Prosodyad – A Novel Tool for Language Analysis

One of the goals of this lab is to share methods and tools for studying communication.  At this week’s Acoustical Society of America Annual Meeting we presented one of the tools developed for our research– Prosodyad, a plugin for the population acoustics analysis software Praat.  Prosodyad was designed for studying emotional prosody in dyadic interactions, particularly conversations in which one patient has a neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD).  Prosodyad focuses on sections of isolated speech from each participant and extracts measures that have previously be associated with different aspects of prosodic emotional expression, providing values both for each interval and across the entire conversation.  Thanks to JJ Atria for coding!