8th Workshop on Laughter and Other Non-Verbal Vocalisations 

Non-verbal vocalisations in multimodal human-human and human-machine interaction play important roles in displaying social and affective behaviours and in managing the flow of interaction. Laughter, sighs, clicks, filled pauses, and short utterances such as feedback responses are among some of the non-verbal vocalisations that are being increasingly studied from various research fields. However, much is still unknown about the phonetic or visual characteristics of non-verbal vocalisations (production/encoding), their relations to the social actions they are part of, their perceived meanings (perception/decoding), and their ordering in interaction. Furthermore, with the increased interest for more naturalness in human-machine interaction, current times also invite exploring how these phenomena can be integrated in speech applications.

The Laughter and Other Non-Verbal Vocalisations Workshop is an interdisciplinary exchange forum where new findings and work-in-progress are discussed with other scholars from diverse research areas in order to gain a better understanding of these phenomena. In 2027, the workshop would be in its 8th edition, celebrating the 20th anniversary from the first edition, with previous events held in Saarbrücken (2007), Berlin (2009), Dublin (2012), Enschede (2015) Paris (2018), Bielefeld (2020), Belfast (2024).  Submissions in previous editions have included work on Conversation Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics, Phonetics, Gesture Studies, Computer Science, Human-Robot and Human-Machine Interaction, Forensic Speech Science, Psychology, Sociolinguistics, L2 Learning, Health and Clinical applications.