Spacing and Orientation in Co-present Interaction -- Group Cohesion, Cooperation and Synchrony in a Social Model of Language Evolution -- Pointing Gestures and Synchronous Communication Management -- How an Agent Can Detect and Use Synchrony Parameter of Its Own Interaction with a Human? -- Accessible Speech-Based and Multimodal Media Center Interface for Users with Physical Disabilities -- A Controller-Based Animation System for Synchronizing and Realizing Human-Like Conversational Behaviors -- Generating Simple Conversations -- Media Differences in Communication -- Towards Influencing of the Conversational Agent Mental State in the Task of Active Listening -- Integrating Emotions in the TRIPLE ECA Model -- Manipulating Stress and Cognitive Load in Conversational Interactions with a Multimodal System for Crisis Management Support -- Sentic Computing: Exploitation of Common Sense for the Development of Emotion-Sensitive Systems -- Face-to-Face Interaction and the KTH Cooking Show -- Affect Listeners: Acquisition of Affective States by Means of Conversational Systems -- Nonverbal Synchrony or Random Coincidence? How to Tell the Difference -- Biometric Database Acquisition Close to “Real World” Conditions -- Optimizing Phonetic Encoding for Viennese Unit Selection Speech Synthesis -- Advances on the Use of the Foreign Language Recognizer -- Challenges in Speech Processing of Slavic Languages (Case Studies in Speech Recognition of Czech and Slovak) -- Multiple Feature Extraction and Hierarchical Classifiers for Emotions Recognition -- Emotional Vocal Expressions Recognition Using the COST 2102 Italian Database of Emotional Speech -- Microintonation Analysis of Emotional Speech -- Speech Emotion Modification Using a Cepstral Vocoder -- Analysis of Emotional Voice Using Electroglottogram-Based Temporal Measures of Vocal Fold Opening -- Effects of Smiling on Articulation: Lips, Larynx and Acoustics -- Neural Basis of Emotion Regulation -- Automatic Meeting Participant Role Detection by Dialogue Patterns -- Linguistic and Non-verbal Cues for the Induction of Silent Feedback -- Audiovisual Tools for Phonetic and Articulatory Visualization in Computer-Aided Pronunciation Training -- Gesture Duration and Articulator Velocity in Plosive-Vowel-Transitions -- Stereo Presentation and Binaural Localization in a Memory Game for the Visually Impaired -- Pathological Voice Analysis and Classification Based on Empirical Mode Decomposition -- Disfluencies and the Perspective of Prosodic Fluency -- Subjective Tests and Automatic Sentence Modality Recognition with Recordings of Speech Impaired Children -- The New Italian Audio and Video Emotional Database -- Spoken Dialogue in Virtual Worlds.

This volume brings together, through a peer-revision process, the advanced research results obtained by the European COST Action 2102: Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication, primarily discussed for the first time at the Second COST 2102 International Training School on “Development of Multimodal Int- faces: Active Listening and Synchrony” held in Dublin, Ireland, March 23–27 2009. The school was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Sci- tific and Technical Research, www.cost.esf.org ) in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the advances of the research activities developed within the COST Action 2102: “Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication” (cost2102.cs.stir.ac.uk) COST Action 2102 in its third year of life brought together about 60 European and 6 overseas scientific laboratories whose aim is to develop interactive dialogue systems and intelligent virtual avatars graphically embodied in a 2D and/or 3D interactive virtual world, capable of interacting intelligently with the environment, other avatars, and particularly with human users.